Looney Tunes features a high amount of Parody Displacement. Caricatures of celebrities, fragments of dialog from then-contemporary movies, catchphrases from old-time radio shows, parodies of once-popular songs; all sailed right over your head if you were a kid watching on Saturday morningnote decades later. The cartoons were intended to be consumed in the time in which they were made, when their audiences would have been fully familiar with all the references they threw in. None of their creators would have expected they would still be popular fifty years later, long after nearly everyone had forgotten the original references.
Examples:
- Bugs Bunny steals entire blocks of shtick from Red Skelton, Groucho Marx, and old-time comedian Joe Besser. His habit of munching on carrots while leaning nonchalantly was also originally a Shout-Out to a famous scene in the film It Happened One Night where Clark Gable's character eats a carrot while leaning against a fence and talking to Claudette Colbert's character with his mouth full. Most audiences in the 1940s immediately got the reference (It Happened One Night was a recent hit at the time), but it eventually just became one of Bugs' signature quirks. Amusingly, this has spawned a popular misconception that rabbits actually have a particular fondness for carrots in Real Life; since many modern viewers don't realize that Bugs' fondness for carrots was a reference to a movie, they're left to conclude that it was based on rabbits' actual eating habits.
- Daffy Duck's speech patterns and impediment were based on producer Leon Schlesinger — who reportedly never noticed. (though Mel Blanc, who refused to ever acknowledge when he did impressions of people, denied it, claiming he came up with the lisp because he though Daffy would have such an impediment speaking through a long beak)
- The character of Foghorn Leghorn was closely modeled on a radio character named Senator Beauregard Claghorn. A staple on Fred Allen's show in the '30s and '40s, Claghornnote was a ridiculous Southerner who offered wry commentary on current events, along with puns and impenetrable analogies (example: "Your tongue's waggin' like a blind dog's tail at a meat market"). In his day, Claghorn was popular enough to inspire a film version of his routine entitled It's a Joke Son, along with an Expy on The Jack Benny Program voiced by Phil Harris. Catchphrases such as "That's a joke, son" and "I say", associated exclusively with the loudmouthed roosternote , were appropriated wholesale from the Senator, who today is all but forgotten. Ironically, actor Kenny Delmar, who voiced Claghorn on Fred Allen's show, could do nothing about it because he hadn't copyrighted the character — copyright was not automatic at the time in the United States. But Warner Brothers did copyright Foghorn Leghorn, meaning Delmar had to get permission from WB to use his own character! Even more ironically, Jon Stewart has referred to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) as "Senator Foghorn Leghorn".
- People are more familiar with Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century than with its parody target Buck Rogers in the 25th Centurynote .
- Daffy is also responsible for permanently changing the pronunciation of an English word. The word "despicable" is actually supposed to be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable
: "DES-picable". Mispronouncing it was part of Daffy's Malaproper schtick. However, since the cartoons reached so many kids who were too young to have the real pronunciation in their vocabularies yet, Daffy's "You're de-SPICK-able" was the pronunciation they all learned. And it holds true still today: That film series isn't called DES-picable Me. On the other hand, few people nowadays say "FORM-idable" or "LAM-entable" either, and that can hardly be blamed on Daffy. - Similarly to the above, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are likely responsible for the term "Nimrod" as an insult. They say it to Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam sarcastically, as Nimrod was a great hunter in the Bible. (Apparently, moviegoers in the 1940s had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament.) It is likely that anyone using the term today will be using it to say that the target of the word is foolish or stupid.
- In fact, it's gotten to the point that most people who now study the Bible will assume that the name Nimrod is flat-out unintentional irony.
- Mel Blanc's impression of Peter Lorre in particular really took on a life of its own. The real Lorre's voice wasn't nearly as raspy as Blanc's imitation, but that imitation has inspired so many others that people raised on them might not even recognize Lorre in any of his films. Similarly, Tex Avery's caricature of Lorre in "Hollywood Steps Out" was so iconic that cartoons inspired it long outlived Lorre himself.
- The Dover Boys is well known as the cartoon where Chuck Jones found his voice with stylized off-the-wall slapstick. Hardly anyone remembers the The Rover Boys books it spoofed (heck, the fact that that's a red link should tell you something).
- Pepé Le Pew is based on (then) well-known French actor named Jean Gabin, who starred in Pépé le Moko (remade in English as Algiers), with a little bit of Maurice Chevalier thrown in. Even if you've heard of these sources, they are less familiar than the amorous skunk is.
- Most younger viewers watching that really thin character type, with blue, blue eyes, and a velvet voice singing and making the females faint, might not know that it is a parody of a young "Franky" Sinatra. Yeah, Ol' Blue Eyes himself.
- Even fewer would recognize him as the "Singing Sword" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
- Lampshaded in a Gilmore Girls episode where Lorelai wonders out loud about whether anvils were so ubiquitous that they would have been so easily recognized by children watching the cartoons.
- While Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is not exactly obscure, it probably says something that the trope And Call Him "George" is named after a cartoon parody of it. The trope's association with Dumb Muscle cartoon characters is so much a part of comedy now that most students reading Of Mice And Men in modern times are absolutely unable to take it seriously, despite it being quite a tragic story.
- Background characters often got one-liners or mannerisms that were taken from the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show, including "That ain't the way I heard it!", "Oh, is that you, Myrt? How's every little thing?", "I bet-cha", and "Tain't funny, McGee!". One of the show's regular cast members, Arthur Q. Bryan, supplied the voice for Elmer Fudd, making him one of the three male voice actors, along with Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg, to regularly appear in the classic Looney Tunes shorts.
- The title character from the Fibber spinoff show The Great Gildersleeve was also parodied several times — Bugs even did a Lampshade Hanging for one, saying that he sounded like "that guy on the radio, The Great Gildersneeze". Many shorts also borrowed the catchphrase of Gildersleeve supporting character Mr. Peavey: "Well, now, I wouldn't say that!"
- The Road Runner was originally intended as a parody of all the chase scenes that were frequent in many cartoons from The Golden Age of Animation. Now it is almost the only famous example of "chase cartoon". To be fair, at least one of the cartoons that they parodied is still very well known.
- More to the point, Chuck Jones intended the blackout gags in the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner sub-series to be a reference to the then-popular "The Fox and the Crow" (1941-1950) series of theatrical cartoons, created by Frank Tashlin for the Screen Gems studio. The series he was imitating/parodying ended in 1950, just a year after Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner debuted. Guess which comedy duo modern audiences are most familiar with.
- A number of tunes that were popular at the time but completely forgotten about later, made appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons. For example, few members of the modern audience would recognize the name of the song "We're in the Money" from the movie Gold Diggers of 1933. But let them listen to the song, and they will immediately recognize the melody that played whenever some character in the Warner Brothers cartoons experienced an unexpected windfall.
- I Love to Singa was a parody of the film The Jazz Singer. Now not a lot of people remember the later one and the titular song is only known either for South Park, Looney Tunes: Back in Action or The Looney Tunes Show.
- The Goofy Gophers are well known for their excessive politeness to each other - "After you!" "No, after you!" - known more than early 20th-century comic strip duo Alphonse and Gaston who established the routine.
- Looney Tunes themselves (and their sibling Warner cartoons, Merrie Melodies) were originally named such as a parody/response to Disney's Silly Symphonies. Nowadays, Looney Tunes are considered the de facto Alternate Company Equivalent to them, and it's very rare that you'll find someone who's heard of Silly Symphonies but not Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies, while the converse is quite likely.
