Tiny Toon Adventures/Tiny Toons Looniversity

Glad to know he wins a few times. ^^

just saw Homeward Bound in "A Cat's Eye View"

I GAVE MY CAT THE BIGGEST HUG ;____;

I found Plucky to be a Jerkass Woobie, personally. I even found this blog. It's too bad it hasn't been updated in 3 years...

I only really found Plucky funny occasionally. He's everything not-entertaining about Chuck Jones' Daffy Duck rolled into one package - though funnily enough when Daffy himself showed up in the show he tended to be pretty funny.

edited 16th Apr '14 10:20:34 AM by KnownUnknown

Do you like the early Daffy more?

Very. Jones' Daffy could be funny (admittedly some of my favorite Daffy episodes are Jones, and the Rabbit Fire trilogy is genius), but generally it either was him making other characters funny rather than himself, or making us laugh at him rather than creating jokes himself (earlier Daffy (and Mc Kimson's Daffy) could do all four).

But the worst of it is that he got Flanderized very quickly, which killed a lot of the entertainment value he already had - which got even worse after Looney Tunes ended, and that characterization became the default to imitate and reuse for decades, the result of which being that he got flanderized even more. By the time Plucky rolled around, the Jones Daffy Duck template had been filtered down to just what was the most unlikeable about him.

It's improved since then, though.

In any case, Plucky is especially noticeable, since while most of the other characters had different facets of themselves that they could express in different kinds of plots (one of the things this show did better than Animaniacs) Plucky barely ever showed a wider personality and usually had the same role.

edited 16th Apr '14 10:57:57 AM by KnownUnknown

Dif'rent Strokes I suppose. It also depends on what you grew up with to an extent. I grew up with the Chuck Jones Daffy and for a while, that's all I knew of him. He also had more depth and more of a concrete personality.

I liked the eariler version of Daffy for those reasons you described. Someone once told that "When Daffy Duck was actually Daffy and Bugs Bunny wasn't invincible, Looney Tunes was funny".

edited 16th Apr '14 6:02:47 PM by Psychopulse

^^ I don't really believe it necessarily has to do with what you grew up with. I grew up with Jones' Daffy too: non-Jones Daffy cartoons didn't really consistently get rerun until after the 90's. It's more just preference, I suppose.

edited 16th Apr '14 8:36:35 PM by KnownUnknown

Daffy's put down routines weren't as funny with Plucky because Plucky was, well, a child after all. The same is twice as true for Furball, whose misadventures often were plain uncomfortable to watch.

Plucky tended to work better when parodying something (like Bat-duck, Kon Plucky, the They Might Be Giants videos).

That sums up my feeling about Tiny Toons: They're like the Looney Tunes, only they make you feel really uncomfortable.

If Tiny Toons was revived today, what are some episodes you see them doing?

edited 17th Apr '14 7:29:36 AM by kyun

Babs in Lady Gaga apparel. There would be lots and lots of it.

They'd need a second music video episode and they'd cover today's hits! ..... no matter how much I hate them.

Bump

never liked this show. Not that funny, annoying characters, and it felt like it was trying too hard to be cool yet still recapture the memorability of Looney Tunes. But here's the thing, making loads of pop cultural references doesn't always make you memorable. 9 times out 10, it'll just make your show dated. Especially the shows from the 80s and 90s.

In that respect, at least, it mimicked Looney Tunes incredibly well.

Watch a short like "The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos" and see how many of the references you can get! I bet you it'll be in the single digits.

I still like this show more so than Animaniacs.

It was the best looney tunes spinoff though. It did pay some homage to the older loonies.

oh my god.. so many references and puns... BUT it was done cleverly :D Like Bing Crowsby or Fats Swallor. I think I have another fav looney tunes short lol.

What I was saying applies more to the "dated" part. As I said, if you watch the short you probably won't get half the references they make to 1930s celebrities.

It seems they really wanted to make a star out of Ben Birdie, who had previously appeared in "The Coo-Coo Nut Grove." Unfortunately, this was his last cartoon.

OK. You got me there. It is a pretty dated cartoon, but it was so funny. Especially towards the end.

I think they were. I wouldn't have mind if he were in more shorts. So much cleverness could ensued.

I don't know how far they could have gone with a caricature of a now-obscure bandleader.

But to be on topic, it's hard to slam Tiny Toons for having dated references (and they weren't that dated anyway, from what little I remember) when Looney Tunes did the exact same thing.

EDIT: Fun fact - did you know that the Ren And Stimpy episode "Haunted House" was supposed to be produced for Tiny Toons? I bet you didn't!

edited 16th Aug '14 1:55:33 PM by Aldo930

I guess you're right. References to old radio personals, old singers, Uncle Tom, and etc can make you dated. But they were done really well. I honestly don't remember Tiny toons having many references that were funny or clever. Unless you count meta humor.

edit: I remember someone saying that, but I didn't believe them because of the relationship John K had with TT.

edited 16th Aug '14 2:05:49 PM by Teddy

The storyboards are online to prove it.

A lot of Ren And Stimpy artists worked on Tiny Toons. Eddie Fitzgerald, one of them, was the inspiration for Pinky of Pinky And The Brain.

Apparently there was a clash between them and the other writers, the ones who'd go on to work on other WB shows. The R&S guys wanted to make cartoons in the spirit of the old WB shorts, and the other writers just wanted to be funny.

I know about Eddie, but geez. Sound like it was like old vs new 0.o

edited 16th Aug '14 4:27:51 PM by Teddy

I just watched "Prom-ise Her Anything" for the first time in years, and you know what, for the first time I really felt bad for Montana Max. So the gist of the plot is everyone's asking each other out to the prom, Elmyra asks Max and he turns her down flat-out. So what? If he doesn't want to go out with her, he doesn't want to go out with her. You can't make someone be attracted to you. Elmyra is annoying anyway. I don't blame him.

But what does Elmyra do? Stalks him throughout the episode (even baiting him into a cage at one point), and eventually tortures him into saying yes. Then Max wisely never shows up to the dance, because he never wanted to go in the first place. And we're supposed to think "oooh that evil Montana Max, how dare he break her heart!" So Buster and Babs find him and force him to go to the dance. And of course Max angrily gives Elmyra a "The Reason You Suck" Speech because enough is enough. Who wouldn't eventually stand up for themselves? He was having fun at some night club in Rio before Buster and Babs kidnapped him and forced him to go out with someone he doesn't like, of course he's going to be pissed. He can only take so much.

Then of course the plot is wrapped up after Max gets rejected by a blonde Red Hot Riding Hood knock-off, learning how terrible it feels to be rejected, and he settles for Elmyra. Aww what a happy ending. Yeah right. So the moral of the story: give in to your stalkers, it's cruel to say no to them.

edited 15th Sep '14 9:20:42 PM by Surenity