If you’re one of those readers who obsessively catalogs all my various likes and dislikes as expressed here on the blog — and you know who you are — let me state for the record that I think the greatest short-form animated films of all time are the classic Looney Tunes cartoons produced by Warner Brothers from the 1930s through the 1960s. You know, the stuff we used to watch on the old Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show on Saturday mornings.

The math here is very simple: Disney shorts are too sappily sweet, Tom and Jerry aren’t all that funny, and Popeye is just plain weird. But the Looney Tunes, especially the ones produced in the post-World War II years… ah, now those are absolutely pure expressions of the abstract concept called “humor.” While there a few Looneys that haven’t aged well, most of them are well-nigh timeless, with sharp, dual-layer jokes that satisfy both adult and child sensibilities, and even though I’ve seen them all about a million and a half times, they still make me laugh out loud.

Curiously, many of the ones I really love are the more obscure ones, the ones that do not star any of the iconic characters like Bugs, Daffy Duck, or Porky Pig.

For example, I love the pair from the mid-50s that feature Ralph Phillips, the overly-imaginative little boy who thinks up outrageous daydreams to escape from his tedious daily life. I love the one that recreates the old Jack Benny Show with mice (I thought that one was funny even before I knew who Jack Benny was), and the one with the big mean bulldog going all soft over a tiny little kitten. And, of course, I love “One Froggy Evening,” in which a construction worker demolishing an old building finds an ancient time capsule that contains a very unusual frog.

You’ll probably recognize that top-hatted, dancing amphibian — nameless in the original cartoon, but who has come to be known as “Michigan J. Frog” — as the mascot for the WB television network. The WB has recently decided to retire ol’ Michie and freshen up their brand, but the original cartoon will no doubt live on (in fact, it appears on the recent Looney Tunes DVD collection). If you’re interested, Mark Evanier uses the occasion of Michigan’s retirement as an excuse to offer up a few fun facts about the character and the cartoon that spawned him. Mark even tracked down a photo of the little-known man who is purported to have been the frog’s voice, and he recounts the true-life event that may have inspired this classic short…