“Hello all you happy people…” There area couple of things you need to know about Droopy, the quiet little dog created by Tex Avery: he always wins and his nemesis usually gets blown up, crushed, smacked, poked, pounded and shot…repeatedly. Bodies squash and stretch, eyes pop out of their sockets and snap back, characters scream so loud their teeth rattle, crack and fall out. Oh, and it’s always very funny. If “Northwest Hounded Police” doesn’t make you laugh, nothing will. Droopy is a quiet, dour-faced little dog beset upon by others, usually criminals or con men in the form of larger and more comically aggressive dogs. He might be a member of the mounted police (as Sgt. McPoodle), a homesteader in the old west, or the leader of a Dixieland band, but he finds a way to triumph over adversity because, “you know what? Cheaters never win.” The animation quality varies from the smooth, fully animated earlier adventures to the more limited angular animation of the later ones (six were not directed by Avery but by Michael Lah), but one thing remains: the funny. This is a marvelously packaged set, with a couple of nice extras, including a retrospective look at Avery’s career.
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