Roger Ebert: Self - Host

Quotes 

• Gene Siskel - Host : [reviewing "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters"]  What you've seen is new footage, but the film also includes vintage footage mixed in, spanning forty years of Warner Bros. cartoons, directed mostly by the great Chuck Jones. Also appearing in the film: Porky the Pig, Sylvester the Cat, and Tweety Bird. They're the support troupes. The pure comedy of some of the vintage material here, especially the simple line drawings of that old cartoon stuff, is just striking to see again as an adult. But the bottom line, of course, is that these cartoons, even stitched together, still make one laugh.

  Roger Ebert - Host : Well, I think you put your finger on the thing that bothered me about this movie, and that is the stitching together. Warner Bros. cartoons were all EXACTLY six minutes long, not one second longer or shorter. That was exactly what their rigid requirement was. They were made to be six minutes long. And when you take a little bit here and a little bit there and stretch it out to an hour and a half, what you get is a film that strangely enough doesn't seem to have any overall pattern or momentum. It seems to be a guided tour of various disconnected segments. And that's why Chuck Jones, the man you give credit to, isn't really one of the fans of this film, even though they took his work. Basically, they plundered it. They went through and created a film that didn't exist. And the movies that are more fun are the ones like the great Bugs Bunny movie, which is essentially an anthology of these perfectly-made six minute cartoons.

  Gene Siskel - Host : Well, you didn't like this?

  Roger Ebert - Host : No, not much. Because I don't think it paid off the way the six minute form, which is as rigid a classical form as you can have, did deliver.

  Gene Siskel - Host : If you want to see a compilation of those six minute cartoons, you can go and find them. I mean, go to a museum, if you want to. I'm saying what this, what this exists, and how it exists, I found very entertaining.

  Roger Ebert - Host : Well, y'know, I...

  Gene Siskel - Host : I mean, I don't think that they've done a travesty to those other cartoons. Those other cartoons exist, I like what they did.

  Roger Ebert - Host : I'd rather see a festival of each one of the cartoons in this movie, seen from beginning to end, just like the way it was made.

  Gene Siskel - Host : Roger, I'd like to go to the, I'd like to go to the movies and see those cartoons before a movie, but the people who run the movie theaters won't do that.

  Roger Ebert - Host : Yeah, but you DO have such a thing as home video.

  Gene Siskel - Host : Then I'll rent them. But I'm saying that THIS entertained me.