A new Looney Tunes series... Why not just air the originals that many people, including myself, have watched over the years instead?


Cause they already air though around the clock on numerous channels all over the world lol

I wouldn't mind a new Looney Tunes series.  I liked past ones such as 'Tiny Toon Adventures' and 'Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries'

Cause they already air though around the clock on numerous channels all over the world lol


but the US

I liked "Tiny Toons", "Duck Dodgers", and also watched "Taz-mania", though haven't seen it forever.

Vaguely remember "Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries", though from reviews I've read it's "so & so"

This can't be any worse than Loonatics.

but the US

I liked "Tiny Toons", "Duck Dodgers", and also watched "Taz-mania", though haven't seen it forever.

Vaguely remember "Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries", though from reviews I've read it's "so & so"


Taz-Mania.  I'd forgotten about that one.  I was a BIG fan of that.  It was on FOX Kids if I remember correctly

I actually would like to see them use the crazy Daffy from the 1930's & 1940's rather than the greedy Daffy from the '50's.

Maybe something like the Looney Tunes comics from the past decade that are true to the classic cartoons (the issues from 1998 to 2003).

Interview of comic book artist David Alvarez

Interview of comic book writer Dan Slott

http://toolooney.goldenagecartoons.com/alvarez_3.jpg

I actually would like to see them use the crazy Daffy from the 1930's & 1940's rather than the greedy Daffy from the '50's.


The "ho-hoo ho-hoo" Daffy as opposed to the "You're despicable" Daffy?

Yes

I don't mind the greedy Daffy ("Ali Baba Bunny", the hunter trilogy), but he was much funnier when he was actually Daffy.

I'm not sure if a true Looney Tunes relaunch could work in today's hypersensitive environment.


Speedy Gonzales would be vilified (despite his popularity in Mexico)
Porky Pig would be protested by the National Stuttering Project
Foghorn Leghorn would be decried as a southern white supremacist chickenhawk
Pepe Le Pew would be boycotted the next time the French government does something asinine


Somehow I expect the relaunched Tunes to not have as much high-brow humour either.  :-\\

I'm not sure if a true Looney Tunes relaunch could work in today's hypersensitive environment.


Speedy Gonzales would be vilified (despite his popularity in Mexico)
Porky Pig would be protested by the National Stuttering Project
Foghorn Leghorn would be decried as a southern white supremacist chickenhawk
Pepe Le Pew would be boycotted the next time the French government does something asinine


Somehow I expect the relaunched Tunes to not have as much high-brow humour either.  :-\\


Don't forget about Broom Hilda.  Wiccans frown upon the fact that she's portrayed as green, cackling with a slight hunchback and greasy hair.

Yosemite Sam - because he is sometime portrayed as a confederate soldier. (a proud one a that)

Actually the witch's name is Witch Hazel.

As a hispanic, I actually like Speedy Gonzales (except when paired with Daffy).  8)

Actually the witch's name is Witch Hazel.

As a hispanic, I actually like Speedy Gonzales (except when paired with Daffy).  8)




That's it.  I thought it was Broom Hilda.  Don't know why.

What about the one with that old southerner who didn't like Yankees.  He had that big bulldog ...

"Oh Belvedere ... come HERE boy!"

Colonel Shuffle

Earl Kress, who wrote several stories for the comic books also wrote for tv cartoons. Wouldn't mind some from the comics being adapted for tv.

Perhaps the best episode of "Baby Looney Tunes" never shown (and also wasn't shown in theatres)

Actually the witch's name is Witch Hazel.

As a hispanic, I actually like Speedy Gonzales (except when paired with Daffy).  8)




You're cool in my book. I love Speedy!

Apparently some felt he was a negative stereotype. I say BS. 

Speedy was fast, resourcefull, smart, funny, and out smarted Daffy.

Somehow I expect the relaunched Tunes to not have as much high-brow humour either.  :-\\


"Duck Dodgers" (2003 to 2005) didn't have grossout humor and there's cartoons  like "Penguins of Madegascar" & "Phineas & Ferb" that doesn't rely much on it.

"House of Mouse", which featured a new batch of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy cartoons were OK.

^ actually a few times "Duck Dodgers" had gross humor, but not much. Honestly, I don't mind it, as long it's not overdone.


Some updates from Toon Zone

From animator/producer Tom Ruegger
I don't know much about the new Looney Tunes project, except that one of the units is headed by Alfred Gimeno, who's among the very best comedy animation directors in the business. I hear he's working with Charley Visser on a bunch of shorts. Alfred, of course, was a key part of the original creative team that pulled together "Tiny Toons," and he directed a bunch of them, and a bunch of "Animaniacs" as well. I also heard that Dan McHugh is heading up the BG designs on the new project. If these guys are allowed to do their thing, it'll he great.

I have noticed lately that TV cartoons -- especially cartoons aimed directly at a kid audience -- are incredibly PC and safe. I've always loved the anarchy and edginess of the classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes. But let's face it: Bugs and Daffy, in their heyday, were not incredibly PC. My hope is that the artists and crew members working on these new cartoons at Warner Bros. are given some creative freedom and allowed to bring that irreverence back to life.

Some rules/suggestions of making a good Looney Tunes cartoon...from Golden Age Cartoons forum


- Don't go crazy with the cameo appearances; two or three characters per cartoon is enough. A Looney Tunes cartoon does not need to contain appearances from every Looney Tunes character ever made.
- Not every cartoon needs a mallet or an anvil.
- There are more characters besides Tweety and Daffy Duck whom you can center a story around.
- Don't try to make the characters "hip" or "edgy", and don't have them spout pop culture references that'll be dated in a week.
- Come up with new ideas; don't just recycle everything Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese ever did.
- Base the characters' designs on the classic cartoons, not their 1990s clip art.
- John Kricfalusi is not God. Do not copy him.
- Elmer Fudd is an idiot, but he's not worthless as a character.
- Sylvester can do more than just chase Tweety.
- Pay attention to timing. Not every Looney Tunes cartoon needs to rocket along like it's on fast-forward or something.
- Just because he dresses in drag, don't make Bugs Bunny gay.
- Daffy Duck isn't supposed to be a jerk all the time.
- Take a cue from the DC Looney Tunes comic book and try some new character team-ups, like Foghorn Leghorn and the Tasmanian Devil, or Yosemite Sam and Pete Puma. Something might just work.
- Warner Bros. has the rights to a lot of songs, so if you want to be contemporary, use Carl Stalling-esque samples in the score.
- Tweety is not a girl.
- Don't use reality TV or movie parodies as a crch for a plot, i.e. the early looneytunes.com webtoons.
- Don't use 3-D shading. Full-blown CGI should also be avoided.
- Write and draw the thing in-house and create some employment for the talented folks who live in this country. Don't just write a script and ship it off to Korea.
- Feel free to lampoon current celebrities, but don't overdo it, and try to pick figures whom the public will still recognize 10 to 50 years from now.
- Characters don't need to talk non-stop; they can do things, too.
- And when casting a voice for Yosemite Sam, remember that he doesn't yell all the time.

I hope they do better with this and not make it too PC.

And I also hope that WB would revive some H-B cartoons as well (Talk about being PC, look at Yogi, Huck, Baba, and Loopy)!

Appears to be on hiatus and most of the artists  have been laid off...

"Retooled"...   8-P

Well atleast  the classic Looney Tunes shorts are returning.  


source: Animation Guild blog
Warners employees called today to explain:

"The series Laff Riot is laying off most of its artists. They told us today that the show is retooling, going in a different direction, and won't be carrying staff while it takes eight or ten weeks to revamp. They expect to ramp back up mid to late January. How many of us will be coming back, they didn't say."

I know this is a big disappointment to designers and board artists who were anticipating a year or more of steady work on the twenty-six half-hours of Laff Riot. "Wanted you to know what's going on over here," a production board artist said to me on the phone. "This caught us all by surprise. It's only been four months. Nothing to do now but go look for another job."

I was at Warners earlier this week and had no inkling of this ...

Down the freeway at Disney TVA Sonora, crews on two show are slowly returning to work.

And at the Walt Disney Animation Studio, they have laid off all but two of the cleanup artists who came aboard for The Princess and the Frog. At the same time, animators are being hired for Rapunzel and sequences are being put in work. (They kind of have to jump into action. The picture has a release date that's only a year away.)

The rest of the cartoon business? It's like the pistons in a 12-cylinder engine: one is going up while another's moving down, which is nerve-wracking for a whole lot of people.


Posted by Steve Hulett at 10:26 PM



source: Toon Zone, posted by Tom Ruegger
   

new looney tunes series "Laff Riot" has shut down

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's the word from Warner Bros. Animation. A sad day in Looney Tunes Land.

On Friday, without warning, much of the staff and crew on "Laff Riot" was let go (with a severance package and vacation pay included). The show has ceased production and is being "retooled."

This 26 half hour re-imagining of the Looney Tunes franchise has been in production since May. The crews have finished storyboards and recordings of close to 12 half hours already. Some episodes are in animation, so to shut the series down at this point is a costly event.

No word as to who made the decision to close it down.

A skeleton crew of senior artists is being kept on to help "retool" the series along with the management team and the producers. If it gets back on track again, it would resume production some time early in 2010.

It's a very sad day for the talented artists who have worked tirelessly and enthusiastically on this for the past half year...

This setback follows recent news about the Tom and Jerry long-form on which Jon McClenahan was working for WB Animation. A month or so ago, that production was shut down in mid-stride as well.

So, uh, WBA -- wazzup?

Argh!!!


8-P Why couldn't Cartoon Network air the original Looney Tunes and on a decent time?

The Looney Tunes Show: A new half-hour animated comedy series starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. No longer confined to 7-minute shorts, Bugs and Daffy are out of the woods and living in the suburbs among such colorful neighbors as Yosemite Sam, Granny, Tweety and Sylvester. In addition to each episode’s main story, The Looney Tunes Show also features “cartoons within a cartoon.” The Tasmanian Devil, Speedy Gonzales, Marvin the Martian and other classic characters sing original songs in two-minute music videos called Merrie Melodies and the Road Runner and Coyote are featured in 2-1/2 minute CG shorts. This all new series is produced by Warner Bros. Animation. Sam Register (Teen Titans, Ben 10, Batman: The Brave and the Bold) is the executive producer. Spike Brandt and Tony Cervone (both Duck Dodgers, Back at the Barnyard, Space Jam) are the supervising producers.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/crappytunes_b.jpg
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/jimsmithdaffy.jpg

8-P Why couldn't Cartoon Network air the original Looney Tunes and on a decent time?


Looking at the updated version of the characters, and thinking to myself "That's strange.  All of a sudden I don't quite feel like myself.  Oh, I feel all right, and yet I... I uh...

*glances at screenshot from 2010 Looney Tunes*

http://reason.com/assets/mc/mwelch/2009_11/Daffy_Screwball.gif

EEEEEK!  YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THAT!"

No network could ever air all of the originals, but they're more than worth seeing.

I'll watch the new versions to see what they can do with current technology.  Flash and CGI-based animation's its own style, and it can be done well, but nothing will replace the pen-and-ink-awesomeness - for you CGI fans, imagine if every frame showed a facial expression or some other thing that could be picked up subconsciously - that was the genius of Termite Terrace 50 years ago.  

The technical work of Chuck Jones could be replicated today in software, but the cost of hiring animators to model every frame by hand before rendering, and then enhancing each frame during key sequences such as the wild takes, would never justify the expense.  The new version can't, and won't, do this, but I'll watch it to see what they can do with the technology they pretty much have to use.  The facial expression on Daffy up there, assuming it's not just the keyframe in an autogenerated sequence of frames, is actually pretty good, and Bugs' expression might work given the context of the scene.

For those younger than about 30-40:  The Looney Tunes "Golden Collection" series of DVDs is what you want.  What's aired on TV doesn't count, as most of the funny gags involving guns, smoking, or any form of violence whatsoever have largely been censored, even on cable.

source

What’s Up, Doc? New Looneys


By BROOKS BARNES
Published: May 19, 2010


LOS ANGELES — Ask a first grader to identify Bugs Bunny and the response more likely than not will be a blank stare. Dora, sure. Mickey, alive and kicking. But Porky who?

Worried that the low profile of the Looney Tunes cast of characters among children is the start of th-th-th-that’s all folks for the historic cartoon franchise, Warner Brothers is embarking on a five-alarm rescue effort.

A new 26-episode half-hour series, “The Looney Tunes Show,” is headed toward Cartoon Network in the fall and will star Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as odd-couple roommates in a contemporary cul-de-sac. Yosemite Sam, Tweety Bird, Sylvester, Marvin the Martian and Porky Pig are their neighbors.

Meanwhile, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote are going back to work in movie theaters in a series of 3-D shorts. The first of these shorts — Warner has approved three, and three more are in development — will play ahead of the movie “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” which arrives in theaters July 30.

The studio’s consumer products and home entertainment divisions are trying to do their share, releasing a new Nintendo game featuring the Tasmanian Devil in September and several new DVD compilations.
An expansion is also under way at LooneyTunes.com.

“We talked at great length about whether we were audacious enough to take on such iconic treasures,” said Peter Roth, president of Warner Brothers Television, who was recently given oversight of the franchise after a restructuring. “It’s both costly and risky, but I think an extraordinary opportunity.”

Warner declined to say how much it is spending on the initiative, but the television series alone carries a cost of about $750,000 an episode, according to industry estimates. “We want to reinvigorate the brand with the best possible execution — high-quality, high-end state of the art,” Mr. Roth said.

Improving the quality will not be difficult. “The bar had gone so low that we could only go up,” said Sam Register, who took over as executive vice president of creative affairs at Warner Brothers Animation two years ago, referring to previous efforts to reimagine Looney Tunes for a new generation.

Warner has a reputation, both with fans and inside the industry, for ham-fisted campaigns to breathe new life into the franchise. Steven Spielberg sparked things up in the early 1990s with “Tiny Toons Adventures,” a series in which new characters interacted with the originals. But a 2002 effort, “Baby Looney Tunes,” was a dud for the former WB network and later for the Cartoon Network.

Big-screen resuscitation efforts have not fared much better. “Space Jam,” a mix of animation and live action starring Michael Jordan, turned a profit back in 1996. But the most recent picture, the 2003 animation-live-action hybrid “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” left North American audiences holding their noses. The movie, with Brendan Fraser, cost an estimated $95 million and sold $25 million in tickets in North America, according to Box Office Mojo and adjusting for inflation.

More recently, big plans for an online Looney Tunes world fizzled amid the economic downturn. “The Loonatics Unleashed,” another television series, was yet another sprucing-up effort from 2005 that introduced futuristic-looking, anime-influenced versions of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, was a wipeout. Many parents hated the Loonatics, which had mohawks and menacing eyes, and the series was canceled in 2007.

This revival, Mr. Register and Mr. Roth promise, will be different. One major shift involves the DNA of the wisecracking characters — it’s the same as what first made them stars in the 1940s. Bugs, Daffy, Porky and crew for the first time in years will look and behave in a manner that is familiar to adults who grew up on the cartoons. No babies. No punked-out space adventurers.

“We really like the voice and the tone of the show, and the look is just magnificent,” said Stuart Snyder, who oversees Cartoon Network as chief operating officer of Turner Broadcasting’s kids media division.

With the Road Runner, who never utters a sound other than the occasional “beep, beep,” and Wile E. Coyote, Warner went directly back to the classic looks — although they will be rendered with computers, an appearance that is now most familiar to children. The speaking characters were more difficult to update, but even they will hew closely to the hallmarks of the past.

“The minute you start drawing Bugs Bunny exactly as he was drawn in 1949, you expect the same animation and the voice to be exactly the same,” Mr. Register said. “That’s obviously not possible, so you pull the best stuff from the characters and do something slightly new with it.”

He added that art from “The Loonatics Unleashed” is framed and hanging in Warner’s animation offices as a reminder of what not to do.

The new series, still awaiting a premiere date, will be broken into bite-size components. There will be three six-minute stories that relate to one another, along with a two-minute “Merrie Melodies” component — in which characters perform in music videos (one features Elmer Fudd singing a love ballad to a grilled cheese sandwich) — and a two-minute Road Runner chase.

Despite misfires, the Looney Tunes brand is a still formidable part of Warner Brothers’ consumer products business, especially overseas, where syndicated reruns of various incarnations still enjoy heavy play. Warner has tried to keep the brand alive in the United States in part by a healthy-eating partnership with Safeway and concerts nationwide called Bugs Bunny at the Symphony where orchestras play the music from classics like “The Rabbit of Seville.”

Sales of Looney Tunes merchandise have been sliding for about eight years, but still ring up over $1 billion annually on a global basis via 1,000 licensees. (To compare, Winnie the Pooh generates about $5 billion annually for Disney.) The hope is that “The Looney Tunes Show,” supported by the theatrical shorts, will fuel new product lines.
“We have to invest quite a bit of money in the content first,” said Brad Globe, president of Warner Brothers Consumer Products. “Once there is new content out there, then retailers will become more interested in it.”

Jerry Beck, an animation historian and the author of the coming “100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons,” said that fans would welcome another attempt to bring back the brand and that Warner, having hired top animation talent to work on the project, seems to be on the right track this time.

“Bugs is down but not out,” Mr. Beck said. “It’s very, very difficult to reweave older characters back into the culture, but I’m glad that Warner is at least not giving up on these guys.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/20/movies/20looney4/20looney4-popup.jpg
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/20/movies/20looney1/20looney1-popup.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Yi47DuaUn6U/S9C7zhVar2I/AAAAAAAAAcY/oqkuR9cehI4/s1600/PC130023.JPG

Y'know I really think this re-boot is gonna work. Usually things like this turn out
horrible, but considering all the work they're putting into this I think it might come pretty
close to being similar to the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Or hopefully just 'decent'. :P
I know I cannot WAIT for thisss, ahhh I'm so excited! :D