So there's this upcoming post-op new wave Looney Tunes cartoon coming, where the usual Warner Bros favorites are remade into futuristic super heroes. It's all over the internet and most people seem to hate it. The concept video (which is also readily found online, although I have a broadcast quality version of it on my desk at work, hyuck) begins with an old-style animation table - the kind that hasn't been used since 1950 - with a cel of six classic Warner characters. Well, five classic characters (Bugs, Daffy, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote and the Tazmanian Devil) and Lola Bunny, the female rabbit counterpart created for Space Jam. We can debate the merits of including Lola all night. What's the current internet lexography for the rolling of eyes?
Then the animator gets pulled away from the table and knocks over the inkwell (something else that hasn't seen use since 1950). The ink proceeds to boil over the characters, turning them into something else. Something fresh. Something different. Then the voiceover begins nattering about how the world of 2772 needs heroes, blah blah blah, while dissolving in borrowed footage from newscasters of previous WB animated series. When the ink fades, the six have been re-created in angular, thick lines... no pupils (representing domino masks, I suppose)... lots of black with character-specific color highlights. Then a zoom-in to the rabbit's face, and he snidely and suggestively says "What's up, doc?" The narrator reveals herself to be Maxima (Montana Maxima?), a Charlie of sorts who has gathered these six heroes to rip off the Teen Titans.
The characters are each introduced... they have new names, so this character isn't Bugs Bunny... he's Buzz Bunny. His superpower is laser eyes and he's "good with his hands," which I found weird. Road Runner has super-speed; name: Roadster. Wile E. can regenerate (hah!) and is now Slick. Lola (?), the master of disguise (??), is Lexi (???) The Tazmanian Devil is Spaz - which made me laugh - and he's strong. Probably still stupid, too. Daffy is now simply Duck, so the well-played "no respect" gag continues. His deal is weaponry.
I actually kind of dig the new character designs.
Although the inkwell bit wants to indicate otherwise, these six super heroes really aren't meant to be Bugs Bunny Turned Into An Extreme Future Hero. I think they're supposed to be entirely new characters, inspired by (re-imagined?) the original Looney Tunes. Oh, and it's called "Loonatics."
Okay, so this isn't the most creative thing in the world.
Fifteen years ago, I probably would have been a lot angrier about it. Defacing the classic characters, sacrilige, dishonoring a legacy. (Fifteen years ago, you could still catch the original material every weeknight in a two hour block on TNT.) Today I'm having trouble mustering up that level of interest.
Many fans are outraged, even though the Looney Tunes cast has already been re-vamped half a dozen times already. As far as I'm concerned, Bugs et. al. stopped being "good" circa 1954. Their shorts from the '50s and '60s (especially the '60s) almost totally suck. Don't tell me there wasn't a creative reboot inside the mother ship even back then. I remember watching the Looney Tunes cartoons on Saturday morning as my Dad pointed out the difference in quality between the older stuff and the newer stuff. Not only in artistic quality (less animation, minimalist backgrounds) but in music, in scripts... in the sudden appearance of disasterously bankrupt characters like Cool Cat.
In the '70s and '80s, the characters were reduced to complete and utter shells inside all those horrible made-for-TV specials and movies. Bugs Bunny and the Arabian Nights. Or that Easter special where Bugs tries to get his nephew to appreciate learning about history. I don't recall anyone storming the Warners lot over that one, and it's the Looney Tunes equivalent to the Star Wars Holiday Special. And I know I'm stepping on sacred ground here, but Mel Blanc's voice talents were on a slow fade in his later years, and it is difficult to hear his final work on the characters without wincing tenderly.
Tiny Toons. Tiny Toons is more or less functionally identical to Loonatics. Take the classic cast and re-present them as kids. Who didn't look at the first episode of TTA and think "What, is this the Warner version of Muppet Babies, with attitude?" There's an example of a revamp that came out fine.
And speaking of attitude, how about Space Jam? Remember when those awful hip-hop t-shirts were everywhere with Bugs and Daffy scowling, dressed in low-slung baggy jeans and basketball jerseys? And when the Tazmanian Devil was turned into an icon for the disassociated moron as "Taz"? They were EXTREME.
Followed by: Baby Looney Tunes. Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. Duck Dodgers. When haven't these guys been made over into something else? With varying degrees of success, of course.
WB is never going to duplicate the classic wartime/post-wartime era of these characters - a Mesozoic Era, considering everything that has happened since. But the good news is they're not going to storm into your home and steal your Looney Tunes Volume 1 DVD boxed set either. I think the sad truth is that the Looney Tunes characters, in their original 1940s forms, just aren't terribly relevant to kids today. Did anyone go see Back In Action aside from some animation nuts and a couple families with free passes from a cereal box? Back In Action was supposedly a fairly respectful treatment of Bugs and company in their "classic" forms. Sassy, anvils-falling-from-sky, etc. Did anyone care?
So. Given that Back In Action was more or less a flop. Given that Duck Dodgers (which actually does a decent job on Daffy's character, I think) isn't exactly burning up Cartoon Network ratings with kids. Given that time is marching on and the original shorts are steadily turning into museum pieces that nobody wants to run anymore.
Given all that, what exactly is WB supposed to do with all that equity they're sitting on?
Either accept that the whims of kid fads aren't with them on this anymore and give up... or invent something [almost] new with it and give it a shot. They're giving it a shot - albeit by aping the modern Power Rangers-style standard in heroic boys action shows - and it's not the worst thing in the world.
Disney has been facing the same trouble with Mickey Mouse for pretty much the identical amount of time. His visual development is forever frozen circa 1950. Nobody runs the original shorts. His biggest contribution for decades was as a corporate icon and theme park host... and nobody at Disney even knew how to resurrect him (while the Ducks, Chip 'n Dale, and the Jungle Book cast were all living large in new Disney Afternoon shows) because he turned into an intrinsically boring character. He was even too boring to lecture kids about going to school in an Easter special. Disney knew they had to do something, or else kids would start growing up with little to no exposure to the character as a character, so they slowly found work for him. An embarrassingly minor role in Mickey's Christmas Carol. Prince and the Pauper. Runaway Brain. Mickey MouseWorks. And my favorite, touring his empty house at DisneyWorld. The House of Mouse cartoon is the end result of all that soul searching, and it's not a bad one. And Kingdom Hearts, but I'm not sure how much of that concepting was Disney and how much was actually Disney fans inside Square Enix in Japan.
Although they didn't strike out Mickey's pupils and give him a super-power. They can at least say that much.
That Loonatics video claims the show will premiere this fall on Kids WB. So either they're further along than that low-budget video suggests, or they think they can turn this around in six months. Given the bad press they're getting over it, maybe it won't happen in this form anyway... which makes all the fan forum bitching even more jejune.
The best you can say is that you would prefer that they do nothing, rather than do Loonatics. Time Warner shareholders would say otherwise, that the company has assets that ought to be exploited. At the very least, Loonatics doesn't look like another groupthink cash-in like Baby Looney Tunes or souless pandering like the holiday clip show specials.
