THAT'S NOT QUITE ALL, FOLKS!('Looney Tunes Golden Collection')(Video Recording Review)

The rerelease of classic Warner Bros. shorts has topped the wish lists of film fans since the beginning of the DVD era--yes, even more than the collected slapstick comedies of Sylvester Stallone. And now Warner Bros. has obliged, in a fashion, with the Looney Tunes Golden Collection (Warner), a four-DVD set with almost seven hours of cartoons and as much supplemental material. The 1975 documentary "The Boys from Termite Terrace" is here, along with commentaries by the animation historians Michael Barrier and Jerry Beck and bright but slight featurettes--Blanc gets less than four minutes, not even as long as a standard short.

Then there are the cartoons. Nearly a thousand Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts were released between the mid-thirties, when the central brain trust was first assembled under the auspices of the animator Leon Schlesinger, and 1963, when Warner Bros., which bought Schlesinger's studio in 1944, shuttered its animation department. This set devotes its first disk to Bugs, splits the second between Daffy and Porky, and gives the balance over to the studio's remaining characters: fifty-six cartoons in all. The anarchic 1953 short "Duck Amuck" is as fine an example of deconstruction as anything in Borges or Barth--Daffy, trying his damnedest to star in a cartoon, is thwarted at every turn by an unseen artist, who redraws scenery, slides a "The End" ...