Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Looney TV: The Lion's Busy (1948-50)

Someone thought that Beaky Buzzard, depicted as dumber than a bag of hammers in a couple of meetings with Bugs Bunny, was worthy of his own series of shorts. Well, it's all according to how one looks at it.

"The Lion's Busy" carries a 1948 copyright, but wasn't released until 2 years later for reasons known only to WB. Kent Rogers, the uncredited actor who voiced Beaky in his earlier appearances, had passed away, so Mel Blanc took over the role, using a voice similar to that of a Native American in Porky Pig's adventure with "The Lone Stranger", a Lone Ranger parody.



Due to the 2-year time lag, I honestly don't believe it deserves to be filed under "Tooniversary". Do you?

Rating: C.

6 comments:

Silverstar said...

Beaky Buzzard was created by Bob Clampett during his tenure at Termite Terrace. Clampett nicknamed Beaky 'The Snerd Bird' due to his voice and mannerisms being based on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's character Mortimer Snerd.

'Tiny Toon Adentures' featured Beaky's heir apparent Concord Condor, voiced by Rob Paulsen. Beaky himself never appeared on TTA, unless one counts the buzzard who inadvertently switches the Acmeland and No Man's Land road signs in "High Toon". To this day fans debate whether or not the buzzard in this episode was Beaky.

hobbyfan said...

Yeah, there is the Snerd influence. Didn't think of that when I wrote the review.

SaturdayMorningFan said...

Not particularly relevant to this thread, so feel free to delete this comment. If you're still looking for good prices on Looney Tunes DVDs, GoHastings.com has some of the Super Stars DVDs and Mouse Chronicles for about $2 (used) plus shipping, and they are having a one-day 41% sale on top of that. The Golden collections are not as good a price as when Amazon runs their sales though. I've heard GoHastings is hit-or-miss with quality for their used discs, but at $2 apiece, it may be worth the risk.

hobbyfan said...

Thanks for the info. Others checking the blog may take your advice, SMF.

Pokey said...

Very hard to do the processing of a lot of Technicolor titles, and in fact, they, Columbia and Paramount switched to Cinecolor which was cheaper, thogh not necessarily better (then again Tech. was hard to top itself till MGM's MetroColor came along--all of the above used MetroColor in the 70s and 80s in addition to MGM).

In addition, Paramount used Polacolor (exclusively for a Popeye.) There were a lot of copyright-release discrepancies;1947-49's PAYING THE PIPER and DAFFY DUCK HUNT were two others.

hobbyfan said...

Um, OK.