Bugs is back, and so is the ‘Looney Tunes’ mayhem
The latest version — from HBO Max — hearkens back to the franchise’s roots
In “Dynamite Dance,” Elmer Fudd comes at Bugs Bunny with a scythe, prompting the hare to jam a stick of lit dynamite in Elmer’s mouth.
Over the course of the short animated video, the explosives get bigger and more plentiful, as Bugs jams dynamite in Elmer’s ears, atop his bald head, and down his pants. The relentless assault moves from rowboat to unicycle to biplane, each blast timed to the spirited melody of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.”
The short has the look, feel and unabashed mayhem of a classic “Looney Tunes” cartoon, circa the early 1940s. But “Dynamite Dance” is of much more recent vintage, one of scores of episodes created by a new crop of Warner Bros. animators over the past two years.
The resulting series, “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” is a throwback effort being used to help fill out a shiny new platform. It premièred this week as part of HBO Max, the new streaming service combining shows and movies from the Time Warner entertainment empire, which includes HBO, TNT, TBS, CNN and Warner Bros. film and television, among other properties. (AT&T, which bought Time Warner in 2018, controls the entire portfolio.)
While “Looney Tunes” has been brought back repeatedly over the years, it has almost always been with an eye toward modernizing the franchise. But in both form and function, “Looney Tunes Cartoons” hearkens back to the franchise’s roots.
The shorts range from one to six minutes in length and star some of Warner Bros.’ most enduring properties (Bugs is still the studio’s official mascot). The fact that they’re on a streaming platform means viewers can watch one or two before a movie, as the original audiences enjoyed them in the days before TV, or binge watch dozens at a time. Aesthetically, the shorts take their cues from the “Looney Tunes” glory years of the 1940s and ’50s, more revival than reboot.
“I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros. had never stopped making “Looney Tunes” cartoons?’” said Peter Browngardt, the series executive producer and showrunner. “As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
The original cartoons are now considered among the greatest in animated comedy. Launched in 1930, the film shorts were created to run before features in movie theatres before moving to TV in 1960.
Over the years, “Looney Tunes,” combined with its sister series “Merrie Melodies,” have been nominated for 22 Academy Awards, winning five; four have been inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Since the original run of “Looney Tunes” shorts ended in 1969, Warner Bros. has taken considerable liberties with the franchise. “Looney Tunes” characters have cavorted with pint-size versions of themselves (“Tiny Toon Adventures,” which ran from 1990 to 1992); played basketball alongside Michael Jordan (1996’s “Space Jam,” and they’ll join LeBron James in the forthcoming sequel “Space Jam: A New Legacy”); been transformed into futuristic superheroes (“Loonatics Unleashed,” 200507); and moved to the suburbs (“The Looney Tunes Show,” 2011-14).
The creators of the new series hope to do justice to the directors, animators and voice artists of the so-called Termite Terrace, a pest-ridden animation facility on Sunset Boulevard where many of the franchise’s most beloved characters were born.
“There was something about the energy of those early cartoons,” Browngardt said. “And those five directors: Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery before he left for MGM, Chuck Jones, and Friz Freleng. They literally invented a language of cinema.”
This latest run began in the fall of 2017, when Browngardt met the Warner Bros. executive Audrey Diehl over lunch about a possible new series. That one doesn’t quite seem right for me, Browngardt told her, but could I maybe direct a Looney Tunes short? He didn’t know it at the time, but an initiative was already in play to revive the classic franchise.
“She said, ‘How about 1,000 minutes of Looney Tunes shorts?’” he recalled. “And I was like, well, that is impossible.”
After a meeting between Browngardt and Sam Register, the president of Warner Bros. Animation, the project began in earnest. Browngardt quickly began assembling a crew of true believers, dogged fans who had watched the originals on syndicated TV.
He enlisted animator Jim Soper for character design (“I’ve been waiting my whole life for this call,” he told Browngardt) as well as storyboard artist Ryan Khatam. A lifelong fan, Khatam had collected and catalogued QuickTime versions of every “Looney Tunes” short since their beginnings in 1930 — something the studio itself had neglected to do.
“I was like, you’re hired,” Browngardt said.
For the position of story editor, Browngardt brought on the Los Angeles-based indie comics artist Johnny Ryan. Before his “Looney Tunes” gig, Ryan was perhaps best known for his work on the indie comic books “Angry Youth Comix” and “Prison Pit,” which feature frequent scenes of nudity, torture, bodily excretions and random violence.
“I thought it would be fun,” Ryan said. After the initial high, the gravity of the project set in. “It’s hard, any time you have to work on your favourite thing,” said Alex Kirwan, a writer and supervising producer. “It’s like someone saying, ‘All right everybody, we’re writing new Beatles songs! Everyone get to work writing Beatles songs.’”
“I’d say there was a good month of just terror,” he added.
In many ways, Ryan said, the toons are both timeless, and not of this time. “We’re going through this wave of antibullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” he said.
“‘Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that,” he continued. “It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”