Woody's return on Blu-Ray

It sounds like that the announcement came from nowhere, but Universal Pictures is going to released a one-disc Blu-Ray collection of the Walter Lantz library in January, which consists of twenty-five cartoons, when several of them make their debuts on Home Video forever in their original filmprint, while some were already seen from TV titled-Prints in the Columbia House series of The Woody Woodpecker Show, which that date of the early-00s.

Fans of classic animation are many for asked more Woody's antics on disc after the short-lived 3-disc DVD set went to an end in the late-00s, due to poor sales.

In 2020, a first attempt on Blu-Ray was made, with just twenty-five Woodys shorts that were all double-dips. (Except one, the fan-favorite The Bird Who Came to Dinner, which it is one of the very rare shorts that gotten a version where any artists "re-drawed" every scenes on their own, which it is deemed a little too ill-fitting for those who only care about the original cartoon.) Considering the eventual return of the Lantz's library on National Television from Me-TV since over two years, a new disc collection was maybe the right opportunity to not only, covering some of the missing-on-action Woody favorites from fans, but also a delightful mix of characters that will all hit HD for the first time ever. It's about time!

If you skipped the many TV Prints that were released in the Columbia House's era, (Actually, it was the negatives of the second Woody Woodpecker Show, that mostly date of the early-1960s.) around every of them makes their debuts on Blu-Ray with their original titles and all, thought one suspect that the only double-dip, Woodpecker in the Rough, wasn't a good way to start a new collection of Lantz's shorts.

2025 was overall, a pretty dry year for classic animation on Home Video, at least compared to says, 2023 or 2024. Despite we finally own the complete series of The Huckleberry Hound Show for the first time ever on Home Video since leaving the syndicated rerurns in the 1960s and that the complete, unedited and definitive collection of the same 1940s-50s Tom and Jerry were united on a same set with some minor flaws like DNR in one short and others, still have that rotten 1960s Metrocolor print. Considering that many online ranted fans think to known better about what they owned for than the studio that actually materialized it, this is obvious that 2026 is going to be a rather murky year, looking if Netflix or Paramount are going to grab the whole Warner Bros.-Discovery catalog for themselves.

It do took over a quarter-century to finally carrying the complete Hanna-Barbera series that won seven Academy Awards on modern-day disc. The only time that Jerry Beck and George Feltenstein actually purposed it was with the duo of The Art of Tom & Jerry laserdiscs set... but labelled by MGM/UA at that time it was owned by Warner Bros. and in the 1990s.

But the Walter Lantz's oeuvre never own this same chance since the early days of Home Video. The lack of actual exposure of these films to the American audience is more than blatant, when we know that Woody, Chilly, Andy and their pals have widely and better recognition from fans worldwide than they ever have in their own native land. Such a lame disgrace.