General Looney Tunes / Assorted WB Animation (that isn't DC) Thread.

This may be a Follow the Leader to Disney's Mickey Mouse (2013), but hey, Tropes Are Not Bad. The original Looney Tunes thrived along side the Classic Disney Shorts. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Speaking of Looney Tunes shorts, I wonder what this mean for the show Wabbit (aka New Looney Tunes)? The show have greatly improved since the second season which featured more of the original Looney Tunes cast members and the focus for each shorts isn't just Bugs Bunny alone. I read somewhere that season three is in development, but with the news of these Creator Driven Looney Tunes shorts I wonder if they would have an effect on that show or they would be seperete from each other like how the current Scooby Doo animated movies are to the current Scooby Doo shows.

I hope they'll try to emulate the style of the original cartoons as much as possible. The overly stylized art direction in Wabbit and those new Mickey Mouse cartoons really turns me off. Also, Chuck Jones Daffy over Bob Clampett Daffy, please (I'll take a good hybrid of the two, like in Back in Action).

What if they show one of these before Shazam! or Wonder Woman 2? That'd be schweet.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with Wabbit!

It doesn't really look...

Also current Daffy is already a hybrid, and it's switching too...

edited 14th Jun '18 4:15:14 PM by randomness4

Actually they say these new shorts will all have a different director, and they'll be actual creative artists. So I do not think they will mimick the animation style of the old cartoons, even though I expect a few or some of them to.

There's one art of Daffy that looks not much like what came before...

Oh wow. Judging the look of every single one of those shorts off of one drawing!

That's good right...

If it's the one of him holding a dumbbell, I think he looks like a vintage Clampett Daffy.

The pudginess got to me...

So! 'Member how we were getting a sequel to Space Jam with Lebron James?

Apparently Lebron will be showing it via the new Instagram TV (IGTV) app when he reveals to the world who he'll be playing for! (Apparently Instagram TV is the Instagram version of YouTube?)

...Brace yourselves.

(Actually, wait, what was the general consensus of Space Jam? I've never seen it in full...)

When it came out, the kids loved while general audiences seemed mixed, and the critics were mixed too. Nowadays it's got more of a cult fanbase.

I've been wondering a while now, do you think the Looney Tunes are even still... relevant? It really feels almost every modern production involving them has been unsuccessfully trying to update them to fit the changing times. I'm wondering if the lack of success is in part because the Looney Tunes are not, at their core, timeless characters. That, on the contrary, part of their success was how mired in the cultural and political landscape of 40s and 50s America they were, and that divorcing them from that context inherently deprives them of part of their charm.

I feel like noting that Disney has had way better luck keeping their classic characters relevant, with them still regularly appearing in a variety of successful animated series, shorts, comics and video games. And I'm wondering if, despite often being dismissed as inferior by classic animation fans, those characters are simply more... adaptible than the Looney Tunes? That they feel less derived from the time period that birthed them, and more easy to adapt to story genres other than irreverent comedy?

I'm not sure that they are. You could blame it on Warner Bros' reluctance to even use them in anything outside of the occasional series remake. But then again they made them in movies and games already, and all those weren't hits.

: Yeah, I don't think it's so much the Looney Tunes can't be relevant and fun again, but it's almost as if the top brass at Warner Bros. have very little faith in them for some reason.

Like, you know how Looney Tunes: Back in Action was supposed to be the Tunes' big comeback? There was a crapload of executive meddling and marketing/advertising for it was apparently nonexistent. Because of this, Back in Action went down the toilet.

Actually, considering how The Iron Giant also had weak advertising, one could make the argument that the top brass at WB has little faith in animation in general.

Oof, I think I made myself sad...

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Jun 27th 2018 at 8:59:55 AM

Thing is, though, even if Looney Tunes: Back in Action had been a success, I don't think it would really have had the same kind of appeal as the classic Looney Tunes. That's because the classic Looney Tunes shorts had so many references — some overt, some subtle — to contemporary culture trends and politics. That gave them some extra depth, maturity and, well, relevance that they've arguably never had again. When you take that away from the Looney Tunes, their brand of comedy can tend to come off as... shallow.

Think of just how much Animaniacs was mired in the culture and politics of the nineties. That, I think, is the closest anyone's ever really come to capturing the charm of classic Looney Tunes, but tellingly enough, with different characters. I think on some level the Looney Tunes themselves may be incapable of recapturing that brand of comedy because of their own success. They've been pigeonholed as timeless classic characters for kids, which I think kind of belies what made them work to begin with.

Studios don't understand that just because you do one risky thing that fails, it doesn't mean it won't be a success in another era. Looney Tunes: Back In Action was seen as the Franchise Killer that relegated them to the TV series and nothing more, and they fail to realize that flopped because it didn't have a clear vision and was the victim of executive meddling, not because people do not like the Looney Tunes anymore. I always wanted to see a CGI Looney Tunes movie done with the type of animation in, say, Storks, or Hotel Transylvania (WAG even hired Sony to animate Storks), but I fear they aren't brave enough to do it. Yet you see stuff like The LEGO Movie, that takes a decades-old property that was thought to be impossible to turn into a movie, and it becomes very successful not because it's LEGO, but because it had two brilliant directors who also wrote the script, and understood the themes of the story and how to execute it well with a challenging animation style. Except for specific types of jokes that will not at all work in 2018, like comedic gun violence, and cross-dressing, I do not understand why WB and WAG won't give these toons another chance by approaching them from another angle.

http://kaiko-art.tumblr.com/post/153418751736/what-am-i-talkin-to-you-for-all-you-gotta-do-is

Edited by kyun on Jun 27th 2018 at 6:39:08 AM

There's also a stagnation problem with being iconic. A lot of series, including Looney Tunes, were successful in the first place because they were made to complement the culture they're from. Looney Tunes stayed successful for decades because they kept updating, kept bringing in new ideas while also being run by people who knew that you could also write the same ideas and core humor in such a way that they could be repeated and still be universally funny.

But a lot of series then hit the point where they're "iconic." Which is where people, rather than continue to treat it as something that's still being created by them or related by them, sees it as something that is what it is and has to be kept the way it is: basically the point where it hits is peak and then nobody moves on from tha tpeak. Which subsequently causes it to be less and less relateable to the present audience, even if that humor is universal, because it becomes an attempt to yank the viewer back to a previous point rather than grow the series. Which is bad for Looney Tunes because, again, the brand relied on change.

A lot of classic & filmreel characters suffered from this. Companies generally couldn't wrap their mind around the idea that classic characters could be reintroduced to a modern audience without pandering simply by building on the core of what makes them work, and thus ruin them with things like attempts to be "hip," or overreliance on memes and public misconceptions, or stupid things like the desire to put "real world" people in a story that happens in like half the live action adaptations out there.

It'll be great to see these characters in short form again, and not shoehorned into a sitcom format. Let's hope as well that the humor has some bite to it.

I honestly think that trying to update the Looney Tunes characters is what's killing them. I think they're absolutely timeless (the way I see it, the three most quintessentially American characters ever created are Huck Finn, Superman, and Bugs Bunny, not necessarily in that order), but yes, the top brass at Warner Bros. never lets the characters just do what they do and instead plonks them into radical reinvention after radical reinvention.

Honestly, I like them a lot more than the classic Disney characters. Their cartoons are a lot smarter and ballsier, to say nothing of funnier. But Warner Bros. doesn't really market them like Disney markets Mickey and co., and they don't have a super-popular theme park to keep them in the public eye (Six Flags isn't that big a deal).

If the Space Jam and/or Roger Rabbit sequel gets made, I'm sure that'll help a lot. I'm sure the new cartoons will help a lot, too. And by the way, I loved Back in Action. I think it's a genuinely great Looney Tunes movie.

On the subject of Space Jam 2, turns out we didn't get that trailer when LeBron James announced where he was going to play next because it was supposed to be a surprise.

Whoops.

And now it just continues to be a rumor. Nice going Lebron.

Are you telling me that there is going to be a Space Jam 2, but Lebron ruined the surprise, so Warner Bros. is now holding back on announcing it?

That seems silly.

It's kinda old news by now, but if you guys have seen Teen Titans GO! To The Movies, chances are you may have seen this:

The WB Animation logo is actually significant is some aspects. Namely:

• It's Eric Bauza's first outing as Daffy Duck. And yes, he is evoking his personality from the Bob Clampett era of Looney Tunes.
• This was directed by Pete Browngardt, who has been established as executive producer for the "1000 minutes of Looney Tunes shorts" campaign.

In other words, we probably just saw our first hint of that campaign.

Yeah this doubles as an advertisement for that upcoming series of shorts where Eric Bauza is voicing both Bugs and Daffy.