The 1990s and 2000s have not been good decades for the Looney Tunes.
While most of the shorts that made them famous ceased production in the 60s, they existed for decades afterward in network television reruns, movies, specials, commercials, and spinoffs until Mel Blanc‘s death in 1989. Ever since then there have been a few attempts to revive the franchise for contemporary times, and each one has been met with rather mixed success.
The original characters had cameos in the great series Tiny Toons and Animaniacs (another show that deserves a revival), but spent a fair amount of the ’90s shilling shoes with Michael Jordan and starring in Space Jam. Meanwhile, the blocks of cartoons that every major network had featured each Saturday morning since the 1950s all disappeared in the 2000s, taking Bugs and Daffy off of free TV for good. The attempted cinematic reboot Looney Tunes: Back in Action got better reviews than Space Jam, but didn’t make back its money.
Sadly, the original characters have largely been silent ever since.
Two semi-revivals appeared in the past decade: the Baby Looney Tunes (a take-off of Muppet Babies) and Loonatics Unleashed, which set the main characters as futuristic superheroes fighting evil aliens. The Toon Zone Blog called it one of the worst cartoons of the decade, and critics and fans alike panned the show.
After these failed attempts at a revival, the Cartoon Network is going to try again, giving the characters a different setting:
“The Looney Toons Show” will star Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, along with Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester — the whole gang. Weirdly, the network is having each episode as a half-hour story along with “cartoons within a cartoon.” The concept takes Bugs and Daffy out of the woods (awww) and puts them into the suburbs (arrrh!) with “colorful neighbors.”
The Hollywood Reporter goes on to mention that the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote will be back in their own CGI-created segments as well, plus new musical segments. We’ll see how that last part goes (does anyone remember old Bugs Bunny and Daffy singing much else besides “This is It”?), but the return of Road Runner and Coyote is a terrific idea. I’m one of the people who thinks that those were some of the funniest short cartoons around, even beating out Tom and Jerry.
The article also makes a point that I have been thinking about for a little while now: why isn’t Warner Bros. taking advantage of the success of YouTube or Hulu and attempting to relaunch these short cartoons there? The Muppet Renaissance owes YouTube and viral videos a lot of credit for taking the fledgling franchise to a brand new audience. I’m sure finances are a bit tight and online ad revenue isn’t quite what it should be, but it’d probably be a risk worth taking. If Bugs and the gang can get turned into babies and anime-knockoffs in the same decade, I’m sure seeing Sylvester chase Tweety across my computer screen can only be a step up.
Funny thing is, Bugs and Daffy and Wile E Coyote, Super Genius are already immortal. Those classic, brillant, perfect cartoons are as much a part of my kids lives as they were of mine…mostly because my mom insists on buying DVD collections of the cartoons, and then sitting in front of the TV and laughing uproariously with them…same way she did when she was a kid.
The problem with brilliance in media is that it’s hard to improve upon it. A work of genius is a work of genius forever.