The Eleven Cartoons Warner Bros. Won't Sell You

There are 1,041 theatrical Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts on the checklist. Most of them you can own tonight if you want to. A few hundred are waiting on restoration. And then there are eleven boxes that cannot be ticked at any price, because the company that owns them has refused to sell them for more than half a century.

They are not lost films. The negatives exist. They have been restored. A finished, extras-loaded DVD set has reportedly been sitting complete at Warner Bros. since around 2011. It has never been released, and every signal from the studio since says it never will be. Collectors call them the Censored Eleven.

What they are

The Censored Eleven are eleven shorts released between 1931 and 1944 whose depictions of Black people are not incidental gags but the entire premise of each cartoon. That distinction matters, because it is the studio's own stated logic for the ban. Plenty of golden-age shorts have had a racist joke snipped for television over the years. These eleven could not be edited into acceptability, because there would be nothing left. And the position taken on the Golden Collection DVDs, which carried disclaimers on other era-typical material, was that censoring the past amounts to denying it happened. So the eleven were never cut. They were simply removed, whole.

The full register:

Every major unit of the studio is represented. Freleng directed four of them. Avery directed three. Clampett's Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is, by reputation among animation historians, one of the most brilliantly animated shorts the studio ever produced, which is exactly what makes it the hardest case. And Angel Puss is the only cartoon on the list from Chuck Jones, a fact that follows his filmography around like a shadow.

How eleven cartoons got locked in a vault

The chain of custody explains a lot. In 1956, Warner Bros. sold its pre-August-1948 cartoon library to Associated Artists Productions, which is why a.a.p. title cards open so many old television prints. United Artists absorbed a.a.p. two years later. So in 1968, at the height of the civil rights era, it was UA, not Warner, that reviewed the package it was syndicating to television and pulled eleven cartoons it judged impossible to broadcast. They have not been officially shown on American television since.

Ownership changed twice more, and the ban survived both moves. When Ted Turner bought the pre-1948 library in 1986, he publicly committed to keeping the eleven out of circulation. When Time Warner acquired Turner in 1996, the catalog came home to Warner Bros. after forty years, ban intact. When the rest of the a.a.p. package was released on the Golden Age of Looney Tunes laserdisc sets, the eleven were the only cartoons in the entire package left out.

The release that almost happened

For one stretch around 2010, the vault door actually cracked open. As part of the first TCM Classic Film Festival, Warner's classic catalog group prepared restored 35mm prints, and on April 24, 2010, eight of the eleven were screened at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, with film historian Donald Bogle, the leading scholar of Black stereotypes in American film, hosting the program. Three shorts, Jungle Jitters, All This and Rabbit Stew, and Angel Puss, were held back from even that screening.

The screening was widely read as a market test, and it seemed to pass. At New York Comic Con that October, Warner Archive representatives said the eleven would be released uncut on DVD in 2011, and called the set their most requested title. Animation historian Jerry Beck later reported the plan had grown into a full retail release with restorations and bonus material, and that the transfers and extras were actually completed.

Then nothing. No cancellation announcement, no press release, just years of silence. By 2016, Beck's report from inside the hobby was blunt: Warner considered the DVD market for classic cartoons dead, and the finished set was shelved indefinitely. As far as anyone can document, that is where it still sits. A restored, mastered, extras-complete release of the eleven most requested cartoons in the catalog, existing and unsellable.

The three that leaked out anyway

Copyright law does not care about corporate policy. Three of the eleven, Hittin' the Trail for Hallelujah Land, Jungle Jitters, and All This and Rabbit Stew, fell into the public domain when their copyrights were not renewed. That is why rough, duped copies of exactly those three turn up on bargain-bin compilations and video sites while the other eight stay locked up. Be clear about what those copies are: unrestored prints of public domain material, legal to duplicate, nowhere near the vault masters Warner struck in 2010. Owning one ticks the box only in the loosest sense.

All This and Rabbit Stew carries an extra sting for collectors, because it is the only Censored Eleven short starring Bugs Bunny. Every complete Bugs filmography on disc is therefore permanently one short short, and the gap is the same short for everyone.

What this means for the checklist

This site exists to answer one question per cartoon: can you own it, and on what disc? For eleven entries the answer has been no for over fifty years, not because the film is lost but because the owner declines to sell it. They are the hardest checkboxes on the complete checklist, harder than any out-of-print box set, because no amount of money solves them.

The ledger keeps them marked. If Warner ever ships the set it finished a decade and a half ago, these eleven flip overnight from unobtainable to in-print, and this page will note the date it happened. Until then, they remain the purest example of the gap this whole site is built to track: the distance between what was made and what you are allowed to own.