Movies

Commentary: ‘Looney Tunes’ has been removed from Max. This is why it feels like an attack

BBG News

In a time so choked with bad news that bad news has to fight to be heard, the bad news that Max, the streaming arm of Warner Bros. Discovery, has stripped the original “Looney Tunes”/”Merrie Melodies” shorts from its lineup is bad enough to have broken through the noise. This removal, adding — or subtracting — 255 cartoons to as many already scrubbed in 2022, eliminates entirely from the streamer the Warner Bros. shorts produced from 1930 to 1969, the years they were made to play in movie houses before live-action features and therefore designed to entertain adults as well as children. This decision is, to be sure, an insult to such directors as Chuck Jones, Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson and Frank Tashlin, among others; voice artists Mel Blanc and June Foray; and composer Carl Stalling — and to the history and art of animation itself.

The great animation units of the 20th century boil down to the Fleischer Studios, which made Betty Boop and Popeye shorts (the ones in black-and-white); MGM, where Tex Avery’s cheesecake cuties had a disturbing effect on his wolves; Disney, of course, whose short films were more stylistically free (and violent) than its features; and Warner Bros., whose cartoons were very much of a piece with its urban house style; Bugs Bunny sits compatibly next to fellow Warner contract player James Cagney. Alongside Disney, Warner assembled the greatest cast of cartoon characters in history: Bugs, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepé Le Pew, the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote and Speedy Gonzalez — problematic, but, as The Times’ Gustavo Arellano reported in a 2021 column, much loved by Mexican Americans and throughout Latin America.

Voices

Arellano: Why do so many Mexican Americans defend Speedy Gonzales?

Speedy Gonzales is often stereotyped, and while there may be issues with such stereotypes, many Mexican Americans seem to enjoy this character, as Gustavo Arellano points out.

Oddly remaining on Max are such subsequent adventures in intellectual-property exploitation as the made-for-television “Looney Tunes Cartoons” (2020), “New Looney Tunes” (2015), “Baby Looney Tunes” (2002), “Tiny Toons Looniversity” (2023), the preschool “Bugs Bunny Builders” (2022) and “The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries” (1995), featuring Granny as a globe-trotting Miss Marple. It’s not impossible that Max metrics indicate that kids these days don’t watch the older hand-drawn cartoons, just as they’re resistant to movies in black-and-white, or anything that smacks of age. (There are humans now in middle age whose first exposure to this cast of characters might have been “Space Jam.”) Possibly the younger demographic prefers its animation wide-screen, sharp and clean and, as often as not, computer-generated. But it’s a strategy that leaves us with the pastiche — however faithfully executed or inspired — and takes away the original, as if the only James Bond books available were the ones not written by Ian Fleming.

It’s a better than fair bet, to be sure, that it’s all about money. This is the company, after all, that has already canceled the release of such nearly or completely finished works as “Batgirl,” “Scoob! Holiday Haunt,” and, the live-action-and-animated “Coyote vs. Acme,” as in Wile E., because the tax write-offs were more appealing. The brand-new feature-length “The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Story,” starring Daffy and Porky — whose teaming goes back to 1937 —and originally set for Max, was raffled off to another distributor, who released it theatrically this past weekend. (It is apparently doing fine.)

Through whatever combination of temporal and cultural forces, I belonged to a generation, or at least a significant fraction of a generation, that was actively interested in what came before us. It’s true that there were only 30 some years between “Steamboat Willie,” the first sound cartoon, and my initial exposure to Mickey Mouse — and 12 years less counting from Bugs Bunny’s first appearance (“A Wild Hare,” 1940) — so it was a manageable chunk of history to absorb. But, broadly speaking, history, of all sorts, seemed important, something the culture wanted you to know in order for you and the culture to progress. It was an adventure.

Hollywood Inc.

Filmmakers are rallying behind ‘Coyote vs. Acme,’ the Looney Tunes movie killed — and later resurrected — by Warner Bros. Discovery.

Before home video made it possible to watch the same thing 20 times instead of 20 different things chance put in front of you, one took what the television handed out. If you were a kid who loved cartoons, you were bound, just because it was there, to look beyond the limited animation of”The Flintstones” and “Yogi Bear” and “Rocky & Bullwinkle” to the fuller, fluid, elegant, classically slapstick works of Golden Age animation. Warner Bros. cartoons were gathered into a variety of Saturday morning hourlong packages — I can sing “This Is It,” the theme song of “The Bugs Bunny Show” (“Overture, curtain, lights / This is it, the night of nights / No more rehearsing and nursing a part / We know every part by heart”) … by heart.

In the internet age we’ve come to expect everything instantly and, if not for free, at least with the illusion that it is — at some level, you’re paying for access, even if it‘s just for whatever digital service allows you to watch YouTube. Access is what these services sell — a sense of possibility, a false idea of ownership. Even if you were a Max subscriber, you may never have known that “What’s Opera, Doc?” and “Duck Dodgers in the ⁠24 ½th Century” were once available there, or you may have known and never bothered to look. You might have just have been satisfied that had you wanted to look, you could. And so when that access is taken away, even if unexplored, it feels like an attack, like removing books from library shelves.

What can you do? It is out of your hands. Museums take paintings down from their walls and put them in the basement or never show them in the first place; rich people buy masterworks and lock them in their vaults. Books and records go out of print. Most films that have physically survived the years are rarely (if ever) shown. You can still find scenes from Warner Bros. cartoons online, including the Warner Bros. Classics YouTube channel, though these are mostly — maybe entirely — extracted highlights rather than full cartoons, which is its own kind of backhanded insult. (You can, to be sure, find whole cartoons posted unofficially — let the spice flow free.) And there are still DVD “Looney Tunes” collections available for sale, though the joke here is that some, poorly manufactured between 2006 and 2008, are apparently now suffering “DVD rot.” Warner Bros. is reportedly offering to replace them; that, at least, is fair.

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2025-03-18 13:40

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