[HN Gopher] Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion (1998)
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       Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion (1998)
        
       Author : joebig
       Score  : 105 points
       Date   : 2024-09-08 11:07 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.warnercompanion.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.warnercompanion.com)
        
       | poki89 wrote:
       | what is this ?
        
         | 0xEF wrote:
         | It's the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion.
        
           | Sardtok wrote:
           | Thank you for clarifying. It's now as clear as a crystal
           | glass filled with tar. /s
        
             | hagbard_c wrote:
             | Would that be a glass of coal tar, pine tar or bitumen?
        
               | GTP wrote:
               | This would help clarifying it.
        
               | Stratoscope wrote:
               | Clarified tar is a beautiful thing.
               | 
               | Just don't turn it into dip!
        
             | firesteelrain wrote:
             | I know this has /s but I am with you on this one. I don't
             | know why people feel free to not post productive comments.
        
               | rogerclark wrote:
               | Is "what is this ?" even a productive comment in itself?
               | That's the point the parent is trying to make. If you
               | click on this link, and you can't tell what it is, you
               | probably don't care what it is. And after that, if you
               | don't care enough to search "Daffy Duck" on Google or
               | whatever, you really don't care what it is. Why would we
               | possibly need a Hacker News comment explaining what
               | Warner Brothers cartoons are?
        
               | firesteelrain wrote:
               | Again another non productive comment. Commenter didn't
               | know what the companion meant. That's all he/she was
               | asking. Why is that hard?
        
             | mapt wrote:
             | Warner Brothers & Hanna Barbera cartoons introduced us to a
             | great deal of culture by repetitive memes. This cinematic
             | universe has hundreds of hours of short-form content, which
             | back in the dark ages of television was fed to us
             | intravenously age 2 to age ~12. Reruns played for decades
             | after the original airdate in the hours after getting off
             | from school or on weekend mornings.
             | 
             | I didn't have any idea who Orson Welles was until I
             | recognized him in school as the person that The Brain
             | ('Pinky and the Brain' on Animaniacs) was a parody of.
             | 
             | To this day I've never seen Peter Lorre, but there was a
             | quite distinctive caricature that repeatedly played on
             | Looney Tunes, and it took half a day of Googling to figure
             | out what that memory referred to.
             | 
             | There are lots of other reference jokes - repeated tropes,
             | voices, facial poses, and musical themes assumed by these
             | shorts that clearly carried some cultural meaning that we
             | intuited by repetition, even if we never understood the
             | source material. It's nice to have a "TVTropes For WB
             | Cartoons" if only because we don't know the name of many of
             | these things to be able to look them up.
             | 
             | Unfortunately the maintainer seems to be largely focused on
             | the 1940's and early 1950's, with most of the references.
        
               | sumtechguy wrote:
               | Is it just me or is the format of that page distinctly
               | odd. Narrow column down the middle with a decently small
               | font.
        
               | maxwell wrote:
               | Looks perfectly normal on a 640x480 VGA.
        
               | firesteelrain wrote:
               | Reminds me of many ham radio pages. Amateur hobby not
               | meant for mobile screens.
        
               | wil421 wrote:
               | How young are you? Looks like what the internet used to
               | look like. It appears the website is from the 90s and had
               | some form of resurrection in 2014. You can still email
               | the original guy on his aol email.
        
               | sumtechguy wrote:
               | > How young are you?
               | 
               | Does it matter?
        
               | wil421 wrote:
               | I guess it does to you.
        
               | sumtechguy wrote:
               | you asked...
        
         | boomboomsubban wrote:
         | Linking to the introduction would make more sense
         | http://www.warnercompanion.com/index.html#intro
        
           | whateveracct wrote:
           | or just the person you're replying to..clicking it? it is
           | very prominent
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | Briefly I thought it was cartoon characters man pages.
         | 
         | Would be kinda fun to do "man 9 Daffy Duck"
        
       | flobosg wrote:
       | (1998) or (2014)
       | 
       | > This page was originally maintained by Stephen Worth. Thanks to
       | John K. for funding its production. Preserved by Kip Williams and
       | restored in 2014 by Harry McCracken.
       | 
       | > The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion is Copyright (c)
       | 1996-1998 E. O. Costello. All rights reserved.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Added above. Thanks!
        
       | lupusreal wrote:
       | Seems to be missing entries for the Censored Eleven.
        
         | shermantanktop wrote:
         | Good riddance. It's antiquated trash.
         | 
         | Others may cherish this stuff as a tribute to free thinking or
         | whatever, but I'm happy to see the lack of distribution as a
         | sign we've learned some things. This isn't Chesterton's Fence
         | or the Mona Lisa, this is just racist humor aimed at boomer
         | kids.
        
           | krustyburger wrote:
           | So they were aimed at boomer kids despite all 11 cartoons
           | having been released before 1945? How odd.
        
             | shermantanktop wrote:
             | Technically you are correct, which is the best kind of
             | correct. Should have said "pre-boomer". But many were made
             | or reissued in 1944, and as I understand it, cartoon shorts
             | were replayed for years.
        
           | pessimizer wrote:
           | Not including this stuff where it belongs is gaslighting.
           | Black people should know what their boss laughed at when he
           | was a kid.
           | 
           | It's also literal whitewashing to take all of the black
           | people out of the past, even if white people depicted us as
           | clowns and monsters. I should be able to say "your
           | grandfather depicted me as a clown and a monster." Better
           | than being a problem swept out of frame.
        
             | shermantanktop wrote:
             | There's still tons of it around! The Marx Brothers movies
             | are a great example of high-quality content with
             | questionable segments that perfectly capture those old
             | stereotypes. And as a classic movie fan, there are tons of
             | movies with incidental black characters like that. I don't
             | think those should all go in the bin, they are a product of
             | their time.
             | 
             | The WB content is aimed at kids, and I think that makes a
             | difference.
        
               | lupusreal wrote:
               | I don't think anybody is arguing for those Censored
               | Eleven to be shown on TV. They're still out there for any
               | adult who cares enough to find, I think that's enough.
               | 
               | For that matter, I wasn't even criticizing the OP
               | document for missing those eleven. Given the time it was
               | written it's quite possible the author didn't even have
               | access to them. In any case, the omission of those few
               | from what seems to be an otherwise comprehensive document
               | is, I thought, notable.
        
       | trbleclef wrote:
       | Just remember, you can't watch a Warner Bros. movie without a
       | Warner Bros. ball cap:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSMj5M9w2qA
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | <shudder> 1-900 numbers. So they give you a number to order
         | something from their catalog, but not only will they get money
         | from you for the items, it's also $1.50 per minute for the
         | call. "I'm sorry sir, but our systems are running a little slow
         | today" to the point your 1-900 fees are more than the items
         | your ordering.
        
           | function_seven wrote:
           | No, no. It's ok. The 900 number is just to order the catalog
           | itself. Once you get that, then you place your orders the
           | regular way.
           | 
           | (Or, that's what the scumbags told themselves, I'm sure)
           | 
           | I think the only thing that outdoes this is the Santa Claus
           | commercial that would play the DTMF tones for the kids who
           | didn't know how to dial a phone. I can't find an example now,
           | but I've seen it before, and Wikipedia has a reference to it.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium-
           | rate_telephone_number#...
        
             | vadansky wrote:
             | Haha, closest modern equivalent would be blasting "Hey
             | Alexa, order the latest Peppa Pig Bluray!"
        
       | biofox wrote:
       | Love Web 1.0 sites. Submitted to https://wiby.me
        
       | leephillips wrote:
       | This is an amazing resource (for those of us who love these
       | cartoons). Thank you for sharing it.
        
       | forgingahead wrote:
       | Nice find. My favourite was always "I shoulda turned left at
       | Albuquerque".
       | 
       | Good explanation from Quora[0]:
       | 
       |  _The old Route 66 (often referred to as "The Mother
       | Road")--which opened in 1926 to drive from Chicago to Los Angeles
       | --was the main method of heading west until the 1950s and the
       | building of modern superhighways. (The trek of numerous Okies and
       | other rural families made destitute by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s
       | has been memorialized in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath.")
       | Route 66 travels through Albuquerque--and actually intersects
       | itself in the middle of downtown (ie., you can stand on the
       | corner of Route 66 and Route 66)--so lots of people likely got
       | confuddled and turned around while driving through
       | Albuquerque...like Bugs!_
       | 
       | [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-statement-
       | in... (Sean Griffin's answer)
        
       | staticman2 wrote:
       | I'm guessing younger people don't understand what a big deal the
       | Looney Tunes used to be. With less channels and less cartoons in
       | the old days, they were something kids would watch repeatedly in
       | reruns. You didn't have a choice of several "cartoon only"
       | channels if you wanted to watch a cartoon.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-10 23:02 UTC)