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News New Looney Tunes from Warner Brothers animation

Christopher said:
As I said before, the censors are concerned with kids imitating what they see. So it's not a question of how violent the weapon is, but of how likely it is that a child might have access to the weapon.
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According to this article about how censorship shaped Batman the animated series, that is exactly the reason that the bad guys used tommy guns, as well as the reason why GI Joe used futuristic ray guns.

http://www.dorkly.com/post/86084/batman-animated-series-censorship
 
captainkirk said:
Wasn't that the reason the bad guys in Batman TAS almost always used Tommy guns rather than more common and contemporary ones? Or was that just a myth?
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That was because the shows seting was around the time the first batman comic came out.
 
comics1996 said:
That was because the shows seting was around the time the first batman comic came out.
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Only indirectly. The show's aesthetic was inspired by the 1989 Batman movie, which tried to go back to the beginnings of Batman and thus created an alternate world with a mix of 1940s designs and modern technology. B:TAS had the same mix -- it had TV and computers and robots, but the TVs were black-and-white and the designs were Art Deco and men wore fedoras and the GCPD flew in blimps. (The 1990 The Flash TV series had the same hybrid aesthetic -- people drove vintage cars, except when they had to blow up, in which case they were more expendable modern cars.)

Although Tim Burton was beaten to the "retro-futuristic" hybrid aesthetic by Max Headroom a couple of years earlier -- set "20 Minutes Into the Future" in a cyberpunk world, but the computers used old typewriter keyboards and vintage TVs for monitors.
 
A preview episode of Looney Tunes Cartoons is up on YouTube:

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There's one full-length Sylvester/Tweety cartoon in the classic style, a quick interstitial with Bugs and Elmer, and a 3-minute Daffy Duck short. The Sylvester/Tweety one is actually fairly good, with some effective comedy bits. The Bugs/Elmer bit is okay. The Daffy one didn't do much for me; it seemed to be going more for the early Tex Avery or Bob Clampett goofball Daffy rather than the more familiar Chuck Jones Daffy defined by his self-destructive egotism. Since it's a one-hander with no other characters (except in one brief gag), there's no room for anything but pure slapstick.

Bugs, Daffy, and Tweety (and others) are now played by Eric Bauza, who seems to be one of the busier voice actors these days. He comes fairly close to Mel Blanc's sound but doesn't do a strict impersonation. I'm not as fond of his version as I was of Joe Alaskey's, or of course Blanc's. Sylvester is Jeff Bergman, who was the very first actor to take over Blanc's characters after he died, though his Sylvester here isn't very close to Blanc's. Sylvester's physical model is different too, with a larger head in proportion to his body than usual. Granny is Candi Milo, which is a bit ironic, as she was in Tiny Toon Adventures as Sweetie Bird, the "protegee" character for Tweety.
 
Today's young animators probably grew up on Spumco more than classic Looney Tunes and MGM stuff as that seems to spill into the style of many of the modern takes on familiar material.

I realized Granny is probably going to ride a motorcycle or scooter. For a second, I thought maybe that was somehow a late inserted coronavirus reference.
 
While the Sylvester and Tweety storyline was certainly Looney Tunes-esque, the animation style reminded me way too much of Ren & Stimpy (which is a bad thing) while the action often reminded me of Tex Avery (not inherently bad but it's off putting for Looney Tunes). That stylization was even worse with the Daffy toon and I barely watched it as a result.

I did like, however, the choice to draw at least Bugs and Daffy in their earlier incarnations instead of the strict class style. The voices are pretty good, too.

However, if this animation style is the norm for these shorts, that's going to be a hard pass for me.
 
Turtletrekker said:
The first new short, "Dynamite Dance"...

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The new shorts will vary between one minute and 6 minutes and will be written and drawn by the top animators in the field.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/variet...s-looney-tunes-cartoons-short-1203240721/amp/
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I’ll be dammed. This is not bad, not bad at all. As I was watching it, I was thinking that this really reminds me of the Looney Toons they made in the 40’s. They tried making new ones once before back in the 60’s, I think, and they sucked compared to the originals. But this short looks great. Looking forward to more
 
Nightowl1701 said:
Here's a few more that popped up on YouTube in the weeks before that one.

"Pest Coaster" (Bugs/Yosemite Sam) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AM7BJ_IpQ

"Wet Cement" (Daffy/Porky) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4IUKV1cV4I

"Tunnel Vision" (Wile E/Road Runner) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjOtnwEwMy0
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The Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner and Daffy/Porky shorts are considerably better than the Sylvester/Tweety and Daffy solo shorts, especially with classic wacky Daffy tormenting poor Porky and I loved the twist on the classic painting on the side of the rock. However, the Bugs/Sam shorts was just as bad as the other two and Bugs' voice is way off. Also, and I know this is just a personal taste, but I don't like Bugs having yellow gloves. It looks all wrong.
 
Man, I really wish WB would go back to remastering the classic Looney Tunes. There are still some glaring omissions that need to get a proper release. :(
 
Tosk said:
Man, I really wish WB would go back to remastering the classic Looney Tunes. There are still some glaring omissions that need to get a proper release. :(
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Yeah, same here. I love my Golden Collections but they're missing a bunch of Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner shorts and almost all of the Sam Shepherd/Ralph Wolf shorts (only ONE in all of the sets). And I'm certain there are plenty of others I've forgotten about or have never seen. Oh, and one particular Merrie Melody that was about technology of the future (set, I think, in the 80s :lol:) and focused on a robot housekeeper who was too much of a perfectionist.
 
The Nth Doctor said:
(only ONE in all of the sets)
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Two, actually...but I had to look it up as I am terrible with the names of shorts. Steal Wool was in collection 3, and Don't Give Up the Sheep was in collection 1. Still a travesty at only two though.

The two that I am absolutely busting to have remastered in a new set are Charlie Dog in Italy ("No onions?"), and the one where Bugs ends up on a plane with Yosemite Sam, who has just robbed a bank and is trying to escape. I still to this day think of that cartoon when I am confronted by technology that seems hard to learn. I can't help but picture Bugs looking at that gigantic control panel in confusion. Oh, and the automatic pilot robot who immediately puts on one of the two parachutes and jumps out of the plane. Man, so good. :D
 
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"Pest Coaster": Mediocre. Eric Bauza's Bugs voice is pretty far off base. The ending was pretty incoherent, with an utterly irrelevant toilet reference thrown in.

"Wet Cement": Not bad. Evocative of some of the classic silent-film shorts in its premise, a trickster just trying to have fun vs. a worker just trying to do his job, putting them in an irresolvable, escalating conflict. This is definitely the pre-Chuck Jones Daffy, though.

"Tunnel Vision": Short, but fairly good, a nice twist on a stock Coyote/Road Runner gag. However, the ending violated the first of Chuck Jones's 9 core rules for the series: "The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going 'Beep-beep!'" Also arguably Rule 2: "No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products."
 
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