With Easter just around the corner and with rabbits running around Regina at the moment, now is the perfect time to talk about Bugs Bunny.
As regular readers of the Cairns on Cinema column know by now, I am a huge fan of all the Looney Tunes characters from the Warner Brothers studio including Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester, Foghorn Leghorn, the Road Runner and Coyote, Pepe le Pew, and even the more obscure characters like Marvin the Martian, Michigan J. Frog, and Sam and Ralph.
In fact, Sam and Ralph kind of remind me of the political parties I cover at the Legislature. The politicians will spend the day beating on each other, but when the 5 o’clock whistle sounds they would call it quits and go home! Just like Sam and Ralph!
The point is my love for the Looney Tunes has lasted to this day. I am sure there are many folks just like myself who used to race down to the television set every Saturday to tune in to the Looney Tunes. I used to wake up bright and early on Saturday mornings to tune in to the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show on CBS. Then, when that show ended, we’d switch the channel over to NBC to the Daffy Duck Show. Those cartoons on NBC were supposed to be the leftovers that weren't good enough for the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, but you could have fooled me.
Around that same time, the local CTV station would also run the Merrie Melodies Show, which also featured Daffy, Sylvester and that fastest mouse in all of Mexico, Speedy Gonzales. I have said time and time again that any interest I have in Mexico today is because of watching Speedy Gonzales on Saturday mornings. But I digress.
That was a point in time when the Looney Tunes were all over the popular culture of the day. They had a number of prime time TV specials during the holidays. They even did TV commercials with Michael Jordan! Not bad for characters from a studio that more or less quit making new cartoons back in 1969.
But now, those classic pre-1969 Warner Brothers cartoons are becoming harder and harder to find, much to the fans' dismay.
This year came some bad news for fans for the classic cartoons. It was announced in March that Warner Bros. was pulling all the classic Looney Tunes off of the MAX streaming platform where they had been for years.
This was a mortal blow, a bewildering move to all Looney Tunes fans. The claim was that these cartoons just weren’t popular enough and that they wanted the MAX service to appeal to more of an adult audience. But adults grew up on the Looney Tunes characters, they love the Looney Tunes!
The move drew out all the conspiracy theories from fans about how Warner Bros. Discovery is being run. They again point to their CEO David Zaslav as showing no interest in Warner Bros. Cartoons and of running the studio into the ground. There have even been rumors that Warner Bros. might sell off the entire catalog, just to keep the rest of the cash-strapped studio afloat.
Personally, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t release this Looney Tunes content, just to keep these characters alive and kicking. It’s not as if it is going to cost any money to make these cartoons. They’re already made and in the vault, so why not extract a few from the archives and show them online occasionally?
Others point to attempted Looney Tunes projects that mysteriously have been on the shelf, such as Coyote vs. Acme. That project would focus on the story of the Coyote filing suit against the Acme Corporation for all the various useless gadgets, contraptions and other products the Coyote would use to try and catch the Road Runner.
It sounds like a great idea, but it has been in mothballs for a while.
The good news is that it looks like we may finally see Coyote vs. Acme after all. Late last month Warner Bros. sold the worldwide rights to the film to Ketchup Entertainment, with plans to release it in 2026. Ketchup Entertainment is also the same bunch who recently released The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. That was another effort that Warner Bros. didn’t know what to do with, but the movie was finally released to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 87 per cent!
So maybe there is hope for the Looney Tunes after all. One piece of good news is that the free streamer Tubi in the USA has picked up both The Looney Tunes Show and Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. Let’s hope there is more Looney Tunes content to come.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Warner Bros. have been streaming some classic Road Runner and Coyote cartoons lately on YouTube. The stream is called “ACME Fools” (a play on April Fool’s) and they have been running a constant loop of cartoons featuring the Coyote getting out-witted by the Road Runner over and over again.
One thing I’ve noticed about these so-called “classics”, though, is that many of these are from the notorious '60s era when Looney Tunes cartoons were on their last legs. The WB studio was outsourcing their animation at that time to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, an outfit better known for producing Pink Panther cartoons. Quite often, DFE would outsource the Road Runner cartoons again, to another company called Format Films. Regardless of who did the actual work, the end product was a lot of cheap-looking junk.
I don't care, it's still the Road Runner and Coyote to me. All I have to say is -- the world needs more Looney Tunes.
