Looney Tunes Thread

Or "The Merry Go Round Broke Down," now best known as the Looney Tunes theme. Most folks don't realize it has lyrics.

Well they probably didn't see that specific Daffy Duck short which had the lyrics.

Or the other Daffy Duck short where he gave it completely different lyrics.

edited 22nd Jan '15 12:06:11 PM by KnownUnknown

Or the episode of Tiny Toon Adventures where Hamton sings it.

Interesting fact: the first Looney Tunes theme was the even-then-old song "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," which was replaced in 1932 by the then-current pop song "Whistle and Blow Your Blues Away."

For the first few years of Merrie Melodies, their theme was "Get Happy." And if you listen to it, I think you can hear it was done by a local dance band. I vaguely hear a banjo in the mix...

By the way, I'm also kinda fond of the very brief jingle that used to sound in the end of the final few Looney Tunes, the Dork Age ones. It doesn't reach the level of the classics, but it's the best thing about that pitiful bunch.

edited 11th Apr '15 6:24:44 PM by AllenJ

Something on Daffy's page that frustrates me:

• Multiple-Choice Past: Chalk it up to Negative Continuity. He was raised by a little girl in the short "Nasty Quacks", grew up in an orphanage in Bah, Humduck!, and was raised by Granny (along with all the other characters) in Baby Looney Tunes.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm...Definitely the first. It was one of the original shorts, whereas "Bah, Humduck!" and "Baby Looney Tunes" were a direct-to-video and a Spinoff Babies made in 2000. Why people even bother to include them is beyond me. Oh, and since when has Looney Tunes ever had continuity?

I heard something about The Merry Go Round Broke Down no longer being owned by WB, so they have to pay royalties every time they use it. Not positive about this though.

I believe so. They only really own "Merrily We Roll Along," "We're in the Money" and something else I don't remember.

Something about copyright law or something...

By the way, folks, if you enjoy the songs you hear as the background in the cartoons... have I got something to recommend you...

edited 22nd Jan '15 6:46:14 PM by Aldo930

WB, for instance, owns the song "Lulu's Back in Town," yet WB animation STILL had to get permission to use it for an episode of Justice League Unlimited, and only got permission to do so under the stipulation that they didn't change any of the lyrics. Just an example of how that kind of thing can work...

Yeah, the idea that anyone would try to hold Looney Tunes characters to some kind of continuity is a mite ridiculous.

Anyone know in what eps Bugs rolls up his "sleeves" or uses his fur as clothing?

There are over 100 cartoons of Looney Tunes.

How do you expect us to remember such a trivial detail? Unless you have photographic memory I suppose.

One trivial detail coming up: "Devil May Hare" from 1953 has the first appearance of the Tasmanian Devil, who of course tries to eat Bugs Bunny. The rabbit, however, dissuades the Devil by raising the fur off one leg, showing a scrawny pinkness underneath. "Look, doc: no meat."

All this talk about music reminds me why Looney Tunes has its own folder under Weird Al Effect.

Looney Tunes were actually created to sell songs, if you can believe it.

Speaking of Looney Tunes and music, the series has its own page for music now! Feel free to add more entries or links when possible!

It's wonderful that there are so many entries on the page for the early 30s cartoons; I've already said it in this thread, but the soundtracks are wonderful examples of dance band music of the period. They're rhythmic and they make you want to move your feet.

It wasn't too hard to make a list of 30's Looney Tunes with great songs, since they were literally required to have a song number in every single Merrie Melodies short up to the late 1930's! They did not dissapoint!

Makes sense. The vast majority of Carl Stalling's soundtracks are pop music, when they weren't public domain / classical tunes (hence why stuff like the Bugs Bunny / Looney Tunes concert that's getting advertised a lot these days is really just a regular classical music concert set to cartoons).

Carl Stalling's arrangements of those tunes were amazing, though, both in how inventive he was in turning popular music into incidental music, and how just plain good they were performed (the melody of "Five O Clock Whistle" used as Red's theme in "Red Riding Rabbit" is still one of my favorite versions of the song). I kind of wish Stalling and Warner Bros in general had made more extended arrangements of the tunes they covered and released more from their banks of music in soundtrack form - but then I wish that of a lot of classic cartoon series (Popeye, for instance).

Sometimes I wonder what Looney Tunes would be like if it did the same kind of pop culture stuff today that it did back then - Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs did a bit of it, but say, if you were to use popular music today as funny accompaniment to scenes what songs would you use and how?

edited 30th Mar '15 2:45:13 PM by KnownUnknown

In a way, that's still being used in scoring today; when pop songs are used in movies and cartoons, often they use something that comments on the action, much as when Carl Stalling used "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" or "The Lady in Red" for any hot woman on the screen, or "Are You from Dixie?" when the short had to do with the South.

I kind of want to clarify, Looney Tunes were meant, in part, to sell the latest songs that were coming out of WB's music publishing house. The first Looney Tunes short prominently features "Singin' in the Bathtub" because it was in one of the WB's first musical films, The Show of Shows (it was probably the biggest hit from the film anyhow), which had been released a few months prior.