Warner Brothers DVDs - where'd the quality go?

So yeah, I picked up Freakazoid! and Tiny Toons over the weekend, since I had a guest that needed Freakazoid! inflicted on him. Good stuff on both of those collections, for those of you who are into '90s toons... but the packaging has taken another downturn, I'm sorry to report.

Back when Warner started putting out their first animation collection (the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection"), they did it "right"... a nice "bookcase" sleeve around a folding, printed cardboard case, with individual storage of DVDs in and among the folds of the case. I'm not doing justice to the package with my description, but, for a general-consumer-targeted DVD collection, it's nice.

Unfortunately, that only lasted for the first three volumes of the Looney Tunes stuff... by the time Volume 4 came out (and they did this with Animaniacs, too), somebody must have decided that all of that printing cost too much... for the same number of discs, the package is maybe two-thirds the original width... and, while they kept the "bookcase" sleeve, the contents are a trifold affair, with the discs stored two to a panel, overlapping... so, if you want disc 2, you have to juggle disc 1 to get at it.

I thought that I'd seen as cheap as Warner was likely to go... until the new Freakazoid! and Tiny Toons collections, that is. Now, there's only a thin cardboard sleeve over the DVD box, which is a clamshell affair with plastic hinged "storage pages" inside, allowing them to store two DVDs per page while maintaining the ability to get at either one independently... admittedly, as an engineering-type, I like the solution, but, even to me, it just doesn't look good. However, the "best" surprise is when you hit the last disc in either collection... it's a double-sided disc. You've seen the type before... usually used when some company wants to provide both "letterboxed" and "full-screen" versions of the same material on the cheap, with a "label ring" so small that you need a loupe to figure out what's on what side of the disc. To me, it's an annoyance... I'm just glad I don't do with DVDs like I used to do with CDs and store them in a binder, tossing the original package.

Oh well, here's hoping I get all the cartoon collections I want out of Warner before they're reduced to distributing stacks of DVDs labeled with Sharpies, separated by waxed paper, with a bolt through the middle to keep them together.