Bugs:[singing] There, you're nice and clean/Although your face looks like it might have gone through a machine.
Danger with a Deadline: In most shorts starring Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog, such as Woolen Under Where, the two characters are expectedly antagonistic towards each other. Until, that is, the end-shift whistle blows, in which they immediately stop whatever beatdown is about to occur, become downright amicable with each other, punch out and go home.
Darker and Edgier: After a decline into faux-Disney style sentimentality and comedy in the 1933 to 1935 period, Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin would pull the studio in the exact opposite direction of them around 1936, featuring street smart, contemporary gags and sardonic, earthy humor. Tashlin's shorts in particular tended to have some rather cold, morally gray or just plain scary elements, such as "Now That Summer Is Gone", "Porky's Romance" (Porky tries to commit suicide in it!) "The Case of the Stuttering Pig" and "Wholly Smoke".
Chuck Jones likewise went through this phase—after his first four years of directing slow paced, mawkish cartoons like Sniffles the Mouse, he abruptly transitions to the same sardonic humor used by his contemporaries by 1942, complete with his own touches of morbid humor, with shorts like "The Draft Horse" and "The Dover Boys". Probably his darkest cartoons are "Fresh Airedale" and "Chow Hound".
Friz Freleng even tried his hand at this during the 1936 period — "Pigs Is Pigs" features one of the most infamous dream sequences in the series, where the gluttonous protagonist (who has no real sympathetic qualities) gets a taste of his medicine, being force fed through an elaborate montage until he violently explodes from overeating!
The Private Snafu shorts (and some of the Wartime Cartoons in general) played up the wilder and violent elements of the series even more—the Snafu shorts, because they were privately screened for soldiers and thus avoided the scrutiny of the Hays Office, even get away with very risque content like a woman doing a striptease (and scantily dressed woman in general, something pretty uncommon in the main series Looney Tunes), some (mild) on-screen swearing, and other content that would never have been allowed in public theaters of the day. If Looney Tunes was The Simpsons of its time, then Snafu was practically their answer to South Park.
And of course Loonatics Unleashed was an extremely blatant attempt at this. Although it quickly changed into trying to find something more like the original material that could still be an action property.
The Darkness Gazes Back: In one Sylvester and son cartoon, Sylvester corners the mouse he's chasing into a dark room and sees a pair eyes staring back. Thinking it's the meek rodent, he charges inside to attack—only to get his ass kicked by the boxing kangaroo.
Daffy peers into a darkened compartment of his Army drive scrap pile ("Scrap Happy Daffy") and sees a pair of eyes glaring back from within. Thinking he's cornered a Nazi saboteur Daffy lights a match to confront him only it was his reflection in a mirror.
In "Easter Yeggs", Bugs keeps running into Elmer trying to shoot him in every door he opens. On the third door, he finds something worse: the Dead End Kid who was pestering him earlier.
In both "The Prize Pest" and "Hot Crossed Bunny", a character (Daffy and Bugs, respectively) enter a closet, not noticing that there is a skeleton inside (a literal skeleton in the closet). There is a beat, and the character comes out performing a Wild Take.
In "The Duckorcist", Daffy opens a kitchen drawer and sees a live-action train headed for him. He closes the door with a puzzled look in his face.
Bugs Bunny is the 2nd most famous Deadpan Snarker in western animation, right after Eric Cartman.
In The Looney Tunes Show, one of his reasons for liking prison is because he can be as snarky as he likes without repercussion.
Bugs: It's a smart-aleck's paradise!
Daffy (post-Flanderization) has quite a sarcastic streak in later cartoons.
Porky is often very verbal about the wacky cast around him, especially when paired with Daffy (particularly the pompous Daffy who was trying to be a star, not the wacky one who always got Porky in trouble).
Tweety certainly has his moments.
Sylvester, too.
Really, it would probably be easier to count the number of Looney Tunes characters who aren't deadpan snarkers. Chuck Jones was especially fond of this trope in his cartoons.
Deer in the Headlights: Whenever someone's about to get hit with something heavy from above, or a train, or anything like that, you can bet that this will be their reaction.
Delivery Stork: One of Freleng's recurring characters is a stork that's so drunk that he delivers babies to the wrong expectant couples. Seen in the shorts, "Apes of Wrath," "Stork Naked," "Goo-Goo Goliath," and "A Mouse Divided".
Demoted to Extra: Porky Pig, despite being the series first major star and mascot from the mid to late 30's, started getting smaller roles by the early 1940's, with his last major billing being in "Porky Pig's Feat" (1943). Apparently, this was due to the fact that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck's more abrasive personalities were far more flexible in humor and in vogue with the time period than the mawkish Straight Man that Porky was. Porky still made appearances throughout the series, but always as a sidekick or secondary character to stars like Daffy or Sylvester from then on out.
Bugs: I could be wrong; maybe it's face north for a southbound moose. Or is it the other way around in reverse?
Depending on the Artist: Because the directors were also in charge of doing the key characters poses, the specific designs would vary from unit to unit. Most noticeable with the Jones and Clampett units. With the latter, the personal style of individual animators, especially Rod Scribner, would stand out.
Depending on the Writer: Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck under Bob Clampett and Tex Avery were manic antagonists. As portrayed by Chuck Jones' writer Michael Maltese, they were almost platonic opposites, Bugs being the cool winner to Daffy's jealous loser. Warren Foster, writer for directors Bob Mc Kimson and Friz Freleng, portrayed Bugs as a more proactive version of the Jones-Maltese model and Daffy as a toned down screwball.
Didn't Think This Through: You know, maybe that giant inflatable duck ("Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur") wasn't such a hot idea after all.
Digging to China: "Tweety and the Beanstalk" and "War and Pieces"
Digital Destruction: The Golden Collection sets have gained some notoriety among some animation buffs for usage of the infamous DVNR process, resulting in oversaturated colors, oversharpened lines (which ruins the look of the cels) or even flat out erased artwork (particularly noticable in the restoration of "The Big Snooze" on Vol. 2), and fuzzy moire patterns. Cartoons released prior to August 1948 would usually suffer the worst from this process, as the rights were owned by various other companies from the late 50s-90s. Explaination: Warner Bros. sold the rights to the color LT/MM shorts (and the Harman and Ising-produced Merrie Melodies) to Associated Artists Productions in 1956, and the cartoons would soon be owned by United Artists, then Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (yep, you readthatright), and finally Turner Entertainment before WB regained them in 1996 due to parent company Time Warner acquiring Turner. Because of this, at least 1 cartoon from the Golden Collection sets would suffer badly from DVNR, and the series' first volume was almost entirely made up of cartoons from the post-1948 library (which had always been owned by WB).
While the restorations for HBO Max have mostly been exceptional, there have been many instances where the title cards were redrawn or Photoshopped.
The climatic drunk car chase of "You Don't Know What You're Doin"! The whole city is wobbling and bouncing like jelly, and the dog chasing Piggy even hallucinates a sewer grate transforming into a hideous monster.
Porky's encounter with Nick O'Teen and a legion of personified smoking and tobacoo products in "Wholly Smoke".
Porky's nightmare of wearing the Leprechaun's shoes in "Wearing of the Grin".
Elmer's Dream Sequence after Bugs invades it in "The Big Snooze" (Bob Clampett's very last short for Warner Bros., by the way).
Disproportionate Retribution: Bugs Bunny is reigning king of this trope. Some cartoons gave him a decent motivation (someone attempting to kill him, destroying his home, etc.), but far more often he would make someone's life a living Hell (or, very rarely, an actual dying Hell) just for annoying him.
Marvin the Martian is perfectly willing to kill billions of lives just because their planet was blocking his view of Venus.
In one particular short, "Good Noose", Daffy Duck is threatened to be hanged by the captain and his pet bird, Mr. Tristan for stowing away on their ship.
The Ditz: Schulz, Private Snafu, Hermann Göring, Elmer Fudd on occasion, etc.
Domestic-Only Cartoon: The original 1930-1969 shorts, the TV specials, the compilation movies, and some of the theatrical shorts from the '90s.
Double Entendre: The most notable is the "beavers damming a river" gag used first in "The Eager Beaver" (Jones, 1946) and "Unnatural History" (Levitow, 1959).
Downer Ending: Quite a few shorts have these, though they are often played for laughs.
The Tex Avery short "Circus Today" ends with the diver falling to his death leading the band to play "Taps".
Each Dawn I Crow ends with John Rooster finding out that Elmer was not planning on using his axe to kill him for dinner after all, but instead to chop a tree. Unfortunately, the tree falls on John, and Elmer ends up having him for dinner after all, though he's still alive as he's being boiled.
Quite a few Foghorn Leghorn cartoons end with him being outsmarted by whoever he's in conflict with, whether he's being dragged away to be eaten by Henery Hawk, starts being cooked by the weasel, gets married to Miss Prissy when he really didn't want to marry her, tied up, dressed in drag, and presumed married to a beatnik rooster in Banty Raids, taken away by the farmer when he gives an ultimatum that either he or the newborn rooster go in Broken Leghorn, and a number of other issues. Though he does tend to come out on top as often as he doesn't.
Porky Pig's Feat ends with Daffy and Porky still locked up in the hotel to which they can't afford to pay the bill, and Bugs Bunny is locked up as well.
Hardly any of Chuck Jones' Daffy Duck cartoons (except A Pest In The House and Rabbit Fire) have happy endings for the character, even before Jones turned him into a loser/bad guy.
"The Unmentionables": Again, played for laughs: Bugs joins Rocky and Mugsy for their long prison sentence because he lost the key to the handcuffs that he arrested them in.
Cheese Chasers: Hubie and Bertie overdose on cheese and decide to commit suicide. So they try to get Claude to eat them. Claude is pestered so badly, he gets turned off to eating mice and decides to commit suicide himself. He tries to antagonize Marc Antony to beat him to death. See Fridge Logic for the bulldog's response to all this. At least he doesn't decide to end it all, at least.
Though he does try to flag down the nearest dog catcher to turn himself in, which is pretty much Suicideby Cop.
Henry Bear trying to off himself in "Bear Feat", only for Junior to save him.
Droste Image: "I Was a Teenage Thumb" ends with the narrator saying the knight who was the size of a thumb had a son who was the size of his thumb, who had a son the size of his thumb, and so on, and so on.
Dysfunctional Family: The Three Bears, with the oversized idiot cub Junyer constantly getting punched in the face by his short, hot-tempered father, and the mother bear being too passive to do anything about it. On the Chuck Jones documentary, Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, Matt Groening stated that the Three Bear family was where he got the idea for The Simpsons being a dysfunctional cartoon family.
Early-Installment Weirdness: The early B&W shorts before 1936 are very, very different from the Looney Tunes characters most of us are familiar with from childhood, to where one would be hard pressed to believe they're part of the same series as Bugs Bunny and others. The differences are as follows:
First, the art style is completely different; the characters were drawn in a pie eyed "rubberhose and dumbbell" style that was common back then.
The strong individual directing styles, post-modernistic humor, fourth wall busting and satirical comedy that the iconic Looney Tunes are known for is virtually nonexistent; the gags are standard slapstick and surreal distortions of the characters, with occasional vulgar humor sandwiched in.
The crop of shorts from circa the 1933 to 1935 period also tended to have sentimental or juvenile Disney style content and humor, a mindset that Looney Tunes would eventually become the total antithesis of. The early shorts of Chuck Jones up to around 1942 likewise aimed for this, and it's a startling contrast to his more famous work.
In contrast to the wide ensemble of characters with distinct personalities littered through both the character driven and oneshot cartoons, the early Looney Tunes relied on characters with either one-dimensional or nondescript personalities—including their first lead stars such as Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid and Buddy. The Bosko cartoons also had no major or recurring characters outside of him, Honey and Bruno. Stock funny animal characters also tended to pop up more than cartoon humans in these early shorts, and even the ones that did pop up tended to be celebrity caricatures drawn in a similar rubberhose style, instead of the more observant caricature style the series eventually settled into. Of the series iconic cast, only two of its major stars (Porky Pig and Daffy Duck) are present in the 1930's, and in Daffy's case, his introduction and subsequent rise to fame was rather late in the 30's era of the series. Porky appeared as early as 1935 and immediately became a series star, but even then, his roles and characterization are quite different from the more famous shorts he's starred in.
The musical style of the series before Carl Stalling's arrival, which by no means bad and featuring excellent songs and compositions, was much more standard musical fare than the distinctive, energetic musical style Stalling brought to the franchise.
The Merrie Melodies were initially more distinctive from the Looney Tunes shorts; prior to around the late 30's, they were animated music videos with no recurring characters (outside of the first five with Foxy and Piggy) that was mandated to have a song number in every single cartoon, something that was eventually dropped to make them another series of gag shorts that are indistinguishable from the Looney Tunes series (although the music video aspect of them would make a comeback eventually).
1946's "Racketeer Rabbit" had a completely different Rocky (this one was a caricature of Edward G. Robinson) than the more familiar one that would debut in 1950's "Golden Yeggs".
Mel Blanc does not voice any characters in the first 151 shorts. The first short in which he has a role is 1937's "Porky The Wrestler", and even then, he only contributes grunts and other non-speaking sounds. 1937's "Porky's Duck Hunt" marks Blanc's speaking debut in the series.
Ear Trumpet: "Now Hear This" is about an old man who finds a new ear trumpet in place of his old and worn-out one. He is overjoyed to have a new shiny trumpet, but it is, in fact, Satan's lost horn, and it turns the old man's world into a synesthetic, nightmarish acid trip sequence.
Eat the Camera: The early Harman-Ising Looney Tunes frequently used a gag where a character would run or fly towards the screen screaming or laughing, and their mouth would almost always envelop the camera! Sometimes it was even the same or similar piece of animation used over and over!
"Sinkin in the Bathtub", ironically, is a subversion, as Bosko comes very close to the camera, but he falls off screen instead.
"Lady, Play Your Mandolin" has a drunk horse running, and laughing mad, towards the camera from a hallucination in the mirror. This piece of animation would be reused in shorts like "You Don't Know What You're Doin!" and "I Love A Parade"!
"Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!" has Foxy eating the camera as his out of control trolley launches him screaming towards the screen.
"Shuffle Off To Buffalo" has a stork carrying a baby towards the screen, whose crying mouth envelops the whole screen.
Even the post Harman-Ising shorts occasionally used this gag. "Hollywood Capers" has Frankenstein's Monster literally eat a camera, and we see it from the cameras POV.
"The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos" has "Moutha Bray" end her song number by eating the camera as she sings "Hey Maaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!"
"To Beep or Not to Beep" has has Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff where a bridge had just been, with a cactus landing on him after the fact. The pain launches him into the air and his mouth covers the whole screen (in red) as he screams in pain.
"Stupor Duck," with Daffy on a rocket ship heading for the moon.
Eat the Evidence: An accidental example. At the end of "Bunny and Claude: We Rob Carrot Patches", the sheriff lectures the titular Rascally Rabbits instead of arresting them immediately — which gives his horse time to eat the stolen carrots he'd planned to use as evidence.
Edited for Syndication: Looney Tunes became notorious for being chopped up when shown on many networks, either edited to remove overly violent gags or racial stereotypes. Some shorts were merely edited for time to make room for more commercial breaks, leaving the unedited versions out of reach for viewers for a time.
The 1961 Bugs Bunny cartoon "Prince Violent" had its title changed to "Prince Varmint" for television in the 1980s.
Two cartoons had edits that were rather dubious, considering what goes on in today's cartoons. The Hasty Hare had footage of astronomer I. Frisby (caricature of Friz Freleng) writing his resignation removed, and Drip-Along Daffy had Porky's final line taken out—after Daffy, in janitor's outfit and clean-up barrel, says "I told you I was gonna clean up this one-horse town!", Porky says to us "Lucky for him this is a one-horse town!"
Surprisingly, a recent showing of part of "Bugs Bunny Bustin' Out All Over" let a butterfly calling Bugs a jackass slip by!
The epithet "jackass" has been used on W-B cartoons before. In 1945's A Tale Of Two Mice, Babbitt tells Catstello (both as mice) that if his plan to get the cheese doesn't work, "I'll...I'll be a jackass!" It doesn't, and Catstello hammers it in ("Jackass! Jackass!! Yer a jackass!! Hee-haw!"). 1950's Mississippi Hare has Col. Cornpone asking Bugs "If'n I had four legs and went 'hee-haw,' what would I be?" Bugs: "Why, you'd be a jackass." (Resulting in one of Bugs' perfectly timed duels.)
When Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers was included on a special edition DVD reissue of Space Jam in 2003, Yosemite Sam was removed from the short for apparent "time allotment" reasons. The full uncut version of the short was later released on the "Essential Bugs Bunny" DVD in 2010.
Edutainment Show: The three shorts, "By Word of Mouse," "Heir Conditioned," and "Yankee Dood It," commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which educated the viewer on how the capitalist economy works and why it's a superior one. These shorts came about in the mid-50's at the height of Red Scare, and it's easy to tell. In fairness, they did at least attempt to make these shorts interesting by throwing gags in between the edutainment, but in all, they pale in comparison to their regular output.
1939's "Old Glory" is educational as well, though unlike the aforementioned Sloan shorts, it doesn't contain comedy at all. Rather, it's a history lesson on the Revolutionary War and the formation of the U.S., with Porky learning about it from Uncle Sam in the wraparounds. At the very least the short codified Porky's color scheme to his current one.
Elephants Are Scared of Mice: Played straight and then inverted in "Unnatural History": a mouse scares a giant elephant, but the mouse itself is scared by a tiny elephant even smaller than he.
In "Baby Bottleneck", Porky Pig pulls on Daffy Duck's leg trying to get him to sit on an egg. It stretches out like taffy, and Daffy tries to gather it before he's chased by Porky, leading him to walk lopsided. He finally pulls the leg back to normal by pulling on a hair on his head.
In "Thumb Fun", Porky and Daffy are on a car when a cop signals them to pull over. Daffy insists that the "long arm of the law" will never catch up with them. Then the cop's arm grabs them by the collar from offscreen, followed by a long pan down the arm.
Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo: Foghorn Leghorn and Egghead. Foghorn is an Affectionate Parody of Senator Claghorn: loud, boisterous, pompous, physically cannot shut up. Egghead is a meganekko Child Prodigy that's The Speechless, who uses his smarts to completely outwit and outmatch Foghorn at every turn.
Also the specialty for Elmer Fudd, in such cartoons as "Good Night, Elmer" (where he spends the entire cartoon trying to put out a candle flame and wrecks his room in the process. And when he finally extinguishes it, it's morning) and "Ant Pasted" (where a bunch of ants fight back against him, though he did deserve it for throwing fireworks at them. Still, the fact that he can't even fight back against ants counts as a major fail).
Everything Explodes Ending: "Captain Hareblower" has Bugs Bunny blowing up Yosemite Sam's ship by throwing a lit match into the gunpowder room. Sam tries to get even by doing the same to Bugs' ship, but Bugs doesn't even try to stop him and Sam makes a hasty retreat. Turns out it was the other kind of powder room (the ladies bathroom), yet it explodes anyway, to Bugs' surprise.
Evil Living Flames: Throughout "Porky the Fireman", portions of the fire Porky is helping to fight come alive and antagonize the firefighters. One fiery figure steals a bucket of water from Porky and dumps it on his head, while another mocks a team of firemen as they try to hose it down. At the end, after the building has burnt to the ground, one last anthropomorphic flame peeks from the rubble and gets doused by dozens of firemen at once... before popping back up from the ashes, knocking all the firemen down with a hose used like a gatling gun, and victoriously beating its chest as the screen fades to black.
Evil Sounds Deep: The construction worker from "Homeless Hare" and the bulldog from "Chow Hound", both voiced by John T. Smith.
Evolving Credits: A given considering how long the series ran - there are at least a dozen differing intros (especially in the 1930s). They can all be broken down, however, into a few basic patterns:
Looney Tunes:
1930-1933: The intro would always feature Bosko and Honey standing in front of a sign with the title of the series.
1933-35: A similar style to the previous one, except with Buddy and Cookie.
1935-1936: Beans, Kitty, Oliver Owl and Porky Pig stand around the series logo (the oldest one currently trademarked, which was later used on the "drum" endings from 1937 to 1946 and currently on Looney Tunes Cartoons)
1936-1942: After the WB shield zooms in front of a tune background, Porky would appear either standing in a pose, being perched in his open drum or lying on a fence with the series logo.
1942-1964: The concentric rings, which need no introduction.
1964-1969: The "abstract" intro, featuring just the series title, an annotation denoting the production company and color process in very rougly-sketched out rectangles.
Merrie Melodies:
1931-1933: The "character of the day" intro, featuring the character to appear in the Merrie Melody perched against the series logo in some way.
1933-1936: The "curtains" intro, which has an earlier version of the series logo placed upon a set of note lines against a curtain background.
1936-1964: The concentric rings, usually somewhat thinner than their Looney Tunes counterparts. As an early oddity, the 1936-1938 cartoons have a blue WB shield instead of the much better known red, which is ironically enough much closer to the parent company's logo than the later red color.
1964-1969: The "abstract" intro.
Evolving Music: A whole book could be written on the subject, given how long the series ran in theaters, but basically, the scores mirrored the changes to popular music and film music.
When the series began, the scores by Frank Marsales, Norman Spencer, and Bernard Brown were heavily influenced by ragtime and foxtrot. By the time Carl Stalling arrived, the cartoons began to have jazz, big band, and swing-influenced soundtracks, with song cues accentuating the on-screen action more common. Milt Franklyn continued this tradition, albeit with a few less song cues and more experimentation in chords and instrumentation. His successor, Bill Lava, was clearly influenced by horror and crime drama films, and that was reflected in his cartoon scores. He also took influence from early rock 'n roll music, as heard in cartoons like "Banty Raids" and "Cool Cat".
You could say that the main themes underwent this, especially Merrily We Roll Along. The 1936/37 season had at least a dozen different versions, which equals to the theme song slightly changing Once per Episode. Then, once the "twang" sound was added in mid-1937 to the WB shield zooming in, the theme seemed to settle on more or less a single basic pattern which was slightly tweaked for the next two years (1938's versions had an orcheatration centered around windpipes, while the late-1938 to 1941 version has a pretty prominent acordion and a second twang sound effect mixed into the very ending of the intro). The 1941 brass-orchestration, generally considered to be the theme that signalled the start of the golden age for the franchise,however, put an end to this - the next reorchestration didn't occur until 1945 (and that only to accomodate longer credits to fit all the animators and the other production staff), and then, after an even longer period, in 1955.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: "He can't outsmart me, 'cause I'm a moron!" (The giant from "Jack Wabbit And The Beanstalk")
Excuse Plot: With very few exceptions, Story is always a formality in the theatrical cartoons and amounts to little more than very basic set ups for each film. The conflict in the series peak year shorts are always a result of either an individual characters actions or friction between the characters personalities and very rarely from an outside conflict or influence. Chuck Jones stressed in his biography "Chuck Amuck" that the characters personalities were always given top priority over the stories;
"An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogersstory what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot. Can you remember, or care to remember, the plot of any great comedy? Chaplin?Woody Allen?The Marx Brothers?"
Face Doodling: It's the theme of "Daffy Doodles": Daffy Duck travels throughout town painting moustaches on every advertisement he can find, until he finds Porky Pig as a policeman trying to catch him, after which he starts painting moustaches on him and everybody else in the city.
Fading into the Next Song: Bill Lava being fond of ending his shorts in the 1962-1964 era with an "E" note so that they could smoothly transition into the "Merrily We Roll Along" closing music, many of the episodes aired during that time do so.
Fake Rabies: In "The Waggily Tale", when Junior dreams he is a dog, his owner brushes his teeth with shaving soap, causing him to be mistaken for a mad dog.
In "Feed The Kitty," Marc Antony the bulldog sprays his mouth with whipped cream to pretend he has rabies in order to scare off his mistress and rescue Pussyfoot the kitten from a bowl of cookie batter. It doesn't work.
Falling into Jail: In Hare Lift, Yosemite Sam bails out of the crashing airplane carrying his bag of stolen loot and laughing maniacally. He stops laughing as he lands in an open-topped car full of unamused police officers.
Family-Unfriendly Violence: Surprisingly and ironically, much less common than in other contemporaneous classic cartoon series, like Tom and Jerry. Any violence will tend to leave the recipient more dazed or angry than seriously hurt, and if the victim in question has fur or feathers, the only real damage they suffer is losing said fur or feathers.
Sometimes this would happen off-screen. For example, in "Knights Must Fall," we never see the immediate impact of Bugs crashing into those knights with his iron armor (we just hear the raucous and witness the judges' reactions to it). However, the end of the cartoon shows him managing a used armor dealership, which includes his nemesis' armor, so we can assume he either killed all those knights or they were forced to turn in their armor after losing the joust.
Special mention goes to the original cut of "Hare Ribbin'" where Bugs straight up shoots the Russian Dog dead after the dog wishes he were dead out of remorse for his (supposed) killing of Bugs.
Fatal Fireworks: In the Merrie Melodies cartoon "It's Hummer Time!" one of the punishments the dog gives the cat is "Happy Birthday," where the cat is given a birthday cake with firecrackers instead of candles and he must blow them out before they go off. Of course he doesn't succeed.
Wile E.:[to Bugs in "Operation: Rabbit"] Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote, genius. I am not selling anything nor am I working my way through college. So let's get down to cases: you are a rabbit and I am going to eat you for supper. (Bugs feigns terror) Now, don't try to get away. I'm more muscular, more cunning, faster and larger than you are, and I'm a genius, while you could hardly pass the entrance examinations to kindergarten. (Bugs looks bored and yawns) So I'll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers.
Bugs: I'm sorry, mack, the lady of the house ain't home. And besides, we mailed you people a check last week. (goes back down into his rabbit hole)
Wile E.:[walking back to his den] Why do they always want to do it the hard way?
Feuding Families: "A Feud There Was", "Naughty Neighbors", "Hillbilly Hare" and "Feud With a Dude".
Fight Bell Hijinks: "Sock a Doodle Do" gives us a variation in Kid Banty, a Pinfeatherweight fighting rooster who has been conditioned to get punchy whenever he hears a bell ring, which becomes yet another point in the tit-for-tat antics between Foghorn Leghorn and The Dog. Foghorn notes that Banty is "more punchy than a drill press". And to demonstrate Banty's talents early on, when a cow lifts its head to look at him and it's bell rings, Banty knocks it across the field into a tree with one punch.
Filching Food for Fun: The 1937 Merrie Melodies short "Pigs is Pigs" had Piggy Hamhock (a predecessor to Porky Pig) compulsively stealing and eating all manner of food, much to his mother's chagrin. He then proceeds to have a lengthy Acid Reflux Nightmare in which a mad scientist uses an elaborate machine to force-feed Piggy until he's grotesquely bloated. When Piggy is finally allowed to leave, he decides to have one last chicken leg for the road... and promptly explodes. Then he wakes up, relieved to find out it was All Just a Dream.
Finger in a Barrel: The Trope Codifier if not the Trope Maker, this is such a standard tactic that it's not clear why anyone even bothers with guns. Most prominently used by Bugs Bunny on Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam when they're (literally) gunning for him, but there's Eleventy Zillion other examples.
Fire and Brimstone Hell: As seen in "Draftee Daffy", "Satan's Waitin'", "Devil's Feud Cake", an episode of "The Bugs Bunny Show", "The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie", "The Three Little Bops", and alluded to at the end of "The Hole Idea".
Friz Freleng's cartoons in general have this a lot (along with characters going to Fluffy Cloud Heaven), particularly the Censored 11 short, "Sunday Go To Meetin' Time," in which a lazy, black man named Nicodemus skips church and hits himself in the head while chasing a chicken, and finds himself in Hell for all of the sins he committed when he was alive (such as skipping church in favor of gambling, stealing chickens, stealing watermelon, and just raising hell [or "dickens", as the cartoon put it]).
"The Three Little Bops" uses it to turn the Big Bad Wolf from an anti-heroic wannabe to a smooth player:
Pig #1: The Big bad Wolf, he learned the rule
You gotta get hot to play real cool!
Flanderization: Different directors often focused on different aspects of a character, most notably with Daffy, Bugs, Elmer Fudd, and Porky.
Flipping the Bird: If the Hays Office would only let Catstello, he'd give Babbitt the boid all right.
Fluffy Cloud Heaven: A lot of Friz Freleng cartoons have this afterlife (and the fire-and-brimstone Hell) as a recurring setting for any character who dies or has a near-death experience (cf. "Sunday Go to Meetin' Time," "Satan's Waiting," "Back Alley Oproar"). Other directors have done this trope too, but Freleng deserves special mention for using it often.
Flynning: In "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", Daffy as an Errol Flynn-type swashbuckling action hero engages in this kind of sword duel with Sylvester as a Basil Rathbone-type villain.
Putty Tat Trouble concludes with Sylvester the cat and his rival in their respective apartments shivering and sneezing with their feet in washpans of hot water. Both cats had fallen through the ice on a frozen pond, courtesy of Tweety and his trusty ice pick.
Referenced in The Unmentionables; as Rocky and Muggsy prepare Cement Shoes for a blindfolded Bugs Bunny, he complains "Look, fellas, how many times do I have to tell ya? I haven't got a cold!"
Foreign Re-Score: The shorts up until the early '50s were recorded in mono Note (or more specifically, the music, sound effects, and voices were all on the same audio track); as a result, it was difficult to dub in foreign countries without replacing the entire soundtrack in the process. This is most easily evident in the foreign dub for The Scarlet Pumpernickel, which uses soundtracks from other cartoons (such as Dog Tales and People Are Bunny). Note (the music only audio track on the Golden Collection set showcases this version's soundtrack)
Forgot I Could Fly: This became a running gag for Daffy in the Duck Dodgers spin-off and recent webtoons on the Looney Tunes website.
The short "The Million Hare" predates those:
Bugs Bunny:[watching Daffy plummet to the ground] I wonder if that silly duck remembers he can fly... [hears slam noise down below] ...Nope, guess not.
Forgot Their Own Birthday: In the short "Fiesta Fiasco", Daffy notices Speedy and his amigos preparing a party. Angry at seemingly being left out of it, he makes several blundered attempts to ruin it. After constantly bludgeoning himself trying to gatecrash the party, he finally gets in....only to be greeted with the surprise party for him (the cartoon was in fact a milestone to celebrate the 30th anniversary since Daffy's first appearance). Daffy realizes he got so caught up in his scheme he rather uncharacteristically forgot it was his birthday.
The 1942 Any Bonds Today? is only 1 minute and 38 seconds long and is in essence a propaganda short where Bugs, Porky and Elmer Fudd sing and dance to motivate people to buy war bonds to support the war effort. It's one of the shortest cartoons available in the Looney Tunes filmography and features no plot or conflict at all.
Norman Normal (1968), which is entirely dialog-based humor, with none of the slapstick and wacky gags associated with the series. It also didn't feature Mel Blanc or any of the other regular voice artists. In fact, it wasn't called a Merrie Melody OR a Looney Tune; it was instead called a "Cartoon Special" (and also featured the titular song by N. Paul Stookey in place of the standard "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" opening and closing music.
While Warner Brothers mostly made cartoons in the outragous comedic formula they're known for, Chuck Jones averted the formula on at least three occasions:
Old Glory, which has no jokes and is instead a visual retelling of the founding of America.
Tom Thumb in Trouble, a surprisingly Disneyesque cartoon that lacks humor. Today its mostly disregarded for its Sickeningly Sweet tone and its been implied that Jones himself eventually considered the cartoon an Old Shame.
Nelly's Folly, made during the peak era of the WB animation studio, is arguably the one cartoon that could be considered dramedy even then its a mostly straightforward drama with some zingers here and there.
Foul Medicine: Played for Laughs in "Hare Brush". Bugs Bunny misinterprets a prescription to "Take one teaspoon with water". Bugs takes this literally and swallows the actual teaspoon, with a suitably disgusted reaction to the taste.
Bugs: Didja ever have the feelin' you was bein' watched?... That the eyes of strange, eerie things are upon ya?... Look... Out there, in the audience. Gossamer: PEOPLE?!! [screams and runs away through several sets of walls]
Fractured Fairy Tale: Occurs quite frequently in the series; in fact, an entire disc in the Golden Collections (vol. 5, disc 2, to be exact) was devoted to cartoons about fairy tales with a twist. One of the earlier examples, though, was Tex Avery's "Little Red Walking Hood".
Franchise Killer: Believe it or not, this has happened to the series—as early as 1933, in fact. After Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising left Leon's cartoon studio, he hastily hired a new team of crack animators, lead by director Tom Palmer, to rush out three new cartoons featuring his Expy of Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, Buddy. These new cartoons were so mediocre that Jack Warner himself rejected them all on sight, with Leon's studio on the verge of getting shut down. Thankfully, Leon got Friz Freleng to return to the studio and rework the rejected cartoons into one coherent cartoon, which thankfully saved this new studio from being killed before it even got off the ground!
What eventually did end up killing the franchise's life on the big screen was television and a number of factors regarding budget. The Looney Tunes franchise has the single longest theatrical run during the Golden Age Of Animation, spanning a whopping 39 years, from 1930 to 1969. During those times technology rapidly evolved, and by the late 1950s television started to kill the night at the movies as the prime source of entertainment. Much as the cartoons were and are beloved by the audiences, the financial situation was against them: only the main feature films note A regular night at the movies program would usually consider of a main movie, a cartoon, a newsreel and sometimes a B movie - by the late 1950s news moved to television and B movies started being released as low budget, but completely standalone features, leaving the cartoons as the only backing feature by the 1960s actually brought in money, and some theaters even started cutting cartoons altogether from their movie lineup note The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc. Paramount case]] of 1948 prohibited package distribution of cartoons with movies, meaning theaters had to buy them separately, and so the natural outcome of the newly optional content was sadly quickly visible . Having found success on TV with The Bugs Bunny Show and AAP packages of cartoons, Warner eventually shuttered the Termite Terrace in 1964 and (for the first time since Leon Schlesinger left in 1943) subcontracted the infamous Daffy and Speedy cartoons to De Patie Freleng Enterprises, which ushered in the infamous Audience-Alienating Era. After a terrible attempt to revive the in-house studio in 1967, the post-Kinney buyout Warner Bros. called it quits, being one of only three studios still making theatrical shorts at the timenote The other two were Walter Lantz with the Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy series, who eventually closed his studio and retired in 1972, and De Patie Freleng which kept The Pink Panther running until 1980, albeit as made for TV shorts that would later be shown in theaters .
The Friends Who Never Hang: Most of the cast have had a short together, sometimes leading to unique dynamics, however, due to some being director specific, a few key stars have not interacted. Special "all star" projects such as the live action movies and The Bugs Bunny Show remedied a few of these.
Funny Animal: Duh. All of them (excluding the human characters, like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam)
Funny Foreigner: Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, and, to a lesser extent, Foghorn Leghorn (with his Southern accent) and Bugs Bunny (with his New York accent), for those who aren't originally from America. The first two have been accused of being offensive stereotypes, but most French and Mexicans see Pepé and Speedy, respectively, as funny spoofs of commonly circulated stereotypes. The latter was even the centerpiece of a campaign started by actual Hispanic fans to bring him back to the airwaves after Cartoon Network banned Speedy's cartoons for not wanting to insult the population.
Values Dissonance, a lot of the suicide gags (particularly the ones involving guns to the head and nooses) are not allowed to be shown on televised versions of these cartoons, lest some young, impressionable mind think its okay to commit such atrocity.
Edited for Syndication: Looney Tunes became notorious for being chopped up when shown on many networks, either edited to remove overly violent gags or racial stereotypes. Some shorts were merely edited for time to make room for more commercial breaks, leaving the unedited versions out of reach for viewers for a time.
