Here's another mini-rant I have regarding Warner Bros., and I'm sure everyone else here agrees with me. When it first came about about two and a half years ago,
In2TV was awesome. What I especially loved about it then, naturally, was their assortment of cartoons; not only was I getting to see "Beetlejuice" and "Freakazoid!" again, but I finally had a second chance to have the honor of watching "Histeria!" after having missed out on it when it was on Kids' WB! Nowadays, though, it seems AOL is doing whatever they can to make In2TV
unwatchable.
The first thing they did was add commercials to the Hi-Q Video files. That wasn't too much of a problem, it was more like just an annoyance. Then they merged the website with AOL Video itself and, as a result, took down those neatly-titled section pages where the shows were housed (i.e. ToonTopia TV for the cartoons). That was also just a little annoyance. But then the bombshell came when, late last year, they discontinued the Hi-Q Video service. And for what reason?! I don't know, something about partnering with Amazon and making the videos available for purchase there, which they are clearly not. Because of that, we can no longer take high-quality screenshots of the show until Warner Home Video gets up off its lazy ass and releases the DVD sets that they probably
don't want to release because they think we'd rather be collecting Hanna-Barbera shows and Cartoon Network originals that only just recently stopped airing so that there'd be better reason for their DVDs to be made.
At the very least, we could still watch the episodes without those damn commercial breaks by seeing them embedded on other websites (i.e. Truveo.com). But guess what - now they've added commercial breaks to the embedded videos, and even worse, some of the videos are suffering from a glitch that causes them to end prematurely (just look at their video of "The Russian Revolution" - it cuts off right in the middle of the "Peace, Land and Bread" song). Now I can't even enjoy watching "Histeria!" because AOL somehow won't let me view the whole episode I'm trying to watch. Adding to that, I had recorded MP3s of just about all the songs and had planned to put them all on CD, but as you know, my computer somehow crashed and died before I could do so, and thus I lost all those precious MP3s (except the regular theme songs and character jingles, because I had already put those on another recorded CD of Warner Bros. cartoon themes). I've attempted to re-record them all, but it's pretty damn difficult to do that when the video files keep cutting off for no reason.
Why has AOL decided for some stupid reason to try and make us
stop watching In2TV?! Despite its problems, In2TV is unfortunately still the only way us fans can watch "Histeria!" anywhere on the Internet, because no one's bothered to make a Torrent of AVI files, and Warner Bros. hasn't made the episodes available for purchase on Amazon like they have with "Animaniacs" and "Freakazoid!" If Warner Home Video says they're not going to release the "Histeria!" DVDs that they
should be putting out instead of those dumb "Popeye and Friends" DVD compilations (which thankfully appears to have been canned), and they claim it's because the show's not getting a good enough amount of views on In2TV (yet there's this one "Scooby-Doo" episode that somehow has over 30,000 views despite the entire series being available on DVD before there even
was an In2TV), it'll pretty much be a stupid reason because they themselves now seem to be deliberately sabotaging our attempts to watch the show on there in the first place! Which is just stupid, because Warner Bros. has made some shows that are clearly much worse than "Histeria!" ever was (*cough*"Loonatics Unleashed" and "Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!"*cough*), and thus "Histeria!" is far more deserving of the DVD treatment. If they say they don't want to make DVDs of it, then I say it's because they're just being mean.
Oh, and in other news, the now-relaunched
Warner Bros. Club has just opened up
their section on "Histeria!" Would you believe that Toast is now a video game reviewer for IGN.com, and that Loud's voice actor being in college now has forced our little friend to change his name?