Over in the message boards at the DVDToons.com website, one of TVShowsOnDVD's longtime readers "DTemplar" had
posted a few days ago a brief which followed up on the
Quick Draw McGraw and
Wally Gator rumors we passed along to our readers back in mid-December. Dan had started the thread back then, passing along to the DVDToons crowd about the gossip we had gotten. He followed it up a few days ago, however, with some disturbing news that hadn't reached our ears yet at TVShowsOnDVD. Here's what he had to say:
Say it isn't So!
There's a wild rumor that Qucik [sic] Draw McGraw won't be on DVD. In fact we might get Magilla Gorilla.
Nothing has been confirmed yet, I hope its actually a rumor.
Well, we followed up on that immediately with our friends-in-the-know, and they have confirmed indeed that both
Quick Draw McGraw and
Wally Gator are both off of the schedule. The decision was made after a change in department heads over at Warner Home Video's animation section. The new person in charge looked at the poor print quality of these two items, and the amount of work needed to be done on them to bring them up to snuff, and then took into account the lower-than-hoped for sales figures on some of the Hanna Barbera DVD releases, and made the hard decision on these two: to postpone them indefinitely and instead direct the resources to go into the more-highly-anticipated
Animaniacs and
Pinky & the Brain DVD sets instead.
Wow, that has to be a difficult decision to make, but then again that's what these department heads get paid the big bucks for. From the point of view of any given Hanna Barbera fan that doesn't care about the two more recent series which will reap the benefits of this decision, we can understand that you will find this very upsetting. From a more impartial point of view, though, this is probably the best decision Warner can make based on the much higher interest levels we see for
Animaniacs and
Pinky. And don't forget, this cancellation may in fact be temporary; there's no reason we couldn't see these hit DVD next year.
Our thanks to "DTemplar" for the info that led us to uncover the correct status of these Hanna Barbera titles. Oh, and as for
Magilla Gorilla, it was apparently under some similar scrutiny as well for a bit: print quality and availability of material that could translate into extras was looked at in order to consider if DVD releases of that title was feasible. So far, our contacts are not aware of any decision that has been made in regard to it. So that's really a non-news item for now. If something comes of it, or of
Wally Gator or
Quick Draw, we'll be sure to let you all know. Stay tuned!
