With April winding down, I felt like I should make one more post focused on the Boomerang channel, as it did have its 24th anniversary this April Fools Day. I'll have a lot more to share with you next year during its 25th birthday (yes, I am indeed already planning that far ahead), but here's something that I think will interest a lot of you. I certainly found it intriguing!
When Boomerang launched, Turner Broadcasting issued a set of promotional VHS tapes to encourage viewers to ask their cable providers for the channel. A similar tape had been done for Cartoon Network back when that channel had launched, but not as many people seem to be aware of the Boomerang one. Below is the sleeve art for the tape. To my knowledge, two others were made as well: one promoting "Boomeraction", a block of programming dedicated to action cartoons, and another containing the entire Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! feature film.
And here's the contents of the tape, uploaded to YouTube by Techatax, a channel I really recommend you check out. Like the CN tape from '93, it features snippets from some of the shows that aired on the channel, as well as those oh-so-iconic bumpers that accompanied them. As Techatax notes in the description, said bumpers sound a little different from the finished versions that aired on television. It's a pretty cool rarity in the world of Hanna-Barbera home video releases if you ask me. I've never seen a listing for these on eBay or similar sites, but I cannot imagine that they're cheap to get ahold of.
Might these mishmash samplers of disparate series possibly have been the inspiration for the "Saturday Morning Cartoons" compilation DVDs that Warner Home Video released fifteen years ago?
ReplyDeletePerhaps. I think it's more likely that the "Cartoon Crack-Ups" DVD (A compilation of episodes from seven HB shows) Warner put out in 2001 was the progenitor for those releases.
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