Unseen for years, One Froggy Evening is included in this collection.

This is indeed a good starting point for Warner Home Video. Should a sea change in attitude toward the Looney Tunes library occur at the highest corporate levels, perhaps the door might open for previously banned cartoons. If the Looney Tunes collections were perceived as serious fare for mature adult film buffs, they could be marketed as such. There is, after all, a great deal of difference in marketing and showing Cleaner Pastures, Coal Black or Uncle Tom’s Cabanato unprepared elementary school children and in making them available to adults.

One way this could be guaranteed is to package the banned shorts as a separate supplement to the LTGC and make this addendum available through direct order from the company. Another route might be to intersperse them with the other cartoons in future anthologies along with knowledgeable disclaimers by the esteemed Mr. Beck and other respected commentators.

Historians and animation scholars have performed similar tasks successfully, and this practice tends to imply that more sophisticated audiences are being addressed. Disney DVD enlisted Leonard Maltin to explain Mickey’s miscreant tendencies for their 2002 “Disney Treasures” release of Mickey Mouse in Black and White, and Maltin did a credible job of navigating the differences between past and present entertainment. These may not be perfect solutions: Immature or racist adults still may purchase these cartoons for the purpose of finding them risible and even responsible adults may possibly show them in an irresponsible manner. Nothing can be guaranteed despite Warners’ best intentions, but this is still a better alternative than eternal censorship or the pretense that such cartoons have never existed.

Critics felt that LTGC Volume 1 missed some great shorts, but Volume 2 helps to make up for it with cartoons like What’s Opera Doc?

As for cartoon fans that want to see and own Coal Black, Tin Pan Alley Cats or Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, remember that we live in a free-market economy in which consumer response dictates production. Nowhere is this dictum more valid than in entertainment. If fans who want to see banned cartoons are satisfied with hunting down poor quality bootleg copies through the dingiest alleys of the Internet, they are welcome to this recourse; they are all out there if one knows where to look. A better alternative might be to cease discussing the matter in Web forums, chat rooms and blogs and take the matter directly to Warner Home Video in the form of well-crafted and knowledgeable demands that previously banned cartoons be considered for inclusion in future releases of LTGC.

Earlier this year Warner Home Video released the 1944 classic, To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. As a bonus they included Bob Clampett’s 1945 cartoon, Bacall to Arms. At the conclusion of this short, Humphrey Bogart puffs an exploding cigarette that leaves him in blackface. His closing line is then spoken in the voice of Jack Benny’s servant Rochester. According to sources, a single letter of complaint found its way to the president of Warner Bros. and this is why cartoons with questionable content have not been considered for LTGC to this point in time.

If this is the power of one letter, what might the power of thousands of emails, letters and other communications accomplish? There is no way of knowing if Warner Home Video would immediately comply, but the demand for these cartoons will have been well established, and more importantly, submitted by a legion of animation fans who view these shorts on the same terms as equally guilty live-action classics. As adults asking for adult entertainment, they may be difficult to deny.

The key for both sides is responsibility. Warners would need to invest in disclaimers or make the cartoons available through more indirect means than the shelves of Wal-Mart. Animation fans and completists need to make a concerted, mature plea to have Warners consider these as classic films, not just old cartoons, and release them accordingly. The LTGC is, in truth, a wonderful idea, and as the Looney Tunes continue to disappear, even from cable programming, the project is more important than ever. Even those shorts that are politically incorrect in part or whole by today’s standards have a place in history. If everyone can simply agree on the terms, they do not have to disappear for all time.

Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman is a longtime student and fan of animation. He lives in Anderson, Indiana.