Have now seen the first three discs of the four-disc DVD set,
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection. You’ve probably seen ost of these 56 classic shorts repeatedly all your life. But with the DVDs you can go beyond the familiar gags and characters, and deconstruct the cartoons into nearly every detail.

Unlike real animals, the Warner Bros. critters don’t die when you dissect them. Instead, they become even more fully “alive” when you discover the sheer beauty within each element of the films.

The stills galleries display original pencil drawings of the characters, their expressions and subtle nuances frozen in time; as well as the background paintings, stunning oil and pastel landscapes suitable for framing on their own.

The “Music-Only Program” feature plays some of the cartoons with only the music-and-effects soundtracks, so you can fully appreciate Carl Stallings’s magnificent scores and Treg Brown’s ingenious sound effects.

Behind-the-scenes segments (including the entire 1975 CBS documentary The Boys from Termite Terrace) and commentary tracks explain some of the studio’s production methods and inside jokes.

An episode of the unseen-in-years Bugs Bunny Show, which aired on ABC primetime from 1960 to 1962, offers a rare peek at the original Warner animation team’s last great project. (Warner now says the Bugs Bunny Show‘s color negatives were inadvertently destroyed in the late ’60s, and it only has the complete episodes in black-and-white prints. But those can now be digitally colorized, so why aren’t they?)

Audio-and-stills snippets from a Mel Blanc recording session let us in on how the voice genius created some of his hundreds of memorable character shticks.

And thanks to the miracle of digital video, you can freeze-frame or slo-mo the complete cartoons themselves. You can learn for yourself how the characters were made to move, about the difference between “ones” and “twos” (inserting a new drawing in every frame of film vs. only in every second frame), about the character poses and color schemes and frame compositions.

The first disc includes a videotaped intro by legendary Warner director Chuck Jones (who died several months before the discs’ release). In it, he defines the Warner cartoons’ humor as “icons of America’s folk hero tradition.” The characters, “flexible and confident and eternally young, are embodiments of America’s robust national spirit and character.” That’s a good definition as far as it goes—Bugs, Daffy, & co. were created in the depression and WWII years, and, like Warner’s best feature films of the time, were driven by a punchy, aggressive, industrious pulse.

But what really makes the Warner cartoons eternal is also what makes them different from all the bad-boy comedy of recent years—the craft, the artistry, the precision.

Steve Martin famously said, “Comedy is not pretty.” In the case of the Warner cartoons, Martin was dead wrong. This comedy isn’t just pretty; it’s truly beautiful.