Looney Tunes / Tropes G to I

• Genre-Killer: For a time, starting off with the Disney Silly Symphonies who introduced this trope, there were many Looney Tunes cartoons which consisted of inanimate objects coming to life when a store (usually a bookstore or a 1930s-style grocery store/pharmacy) closed up shop for the night ("Goofy Groceries", "Have You Got Any Castles", "A Coy Decoy", "Speaking of the Weather", etc.) The subgenre of cartoons, at least when it came to Looney Tunes, officially came to an end with 1946's "Book Revue" which, coincidentally, was also the last cartoon Bob Clampett got credit for.
• Gift Shake: "This Is a Life?": Bugs Bunny shakes a wrapped gift Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam give him in and then pauses to listen. The ticking tips him off it's a bomb. A game of "You take it" ensues.
• Glove Slap: Seen in numerous cartoons when a character challenges another to a duel, but perhaps the most widely remembered one comes from "Hare Trimmed".
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: And it's always a looooong way down, especially in Wile E. Coyote's case. Gravity Is a Harsh Seamstress, too.
• Gravity Is Only a Theory:
  • In "High Diving Hare", Sam finally has Bugs Bunny tied and standing on the edge of the platform, with Sam sawing away at the board, gloating: "Now ya smarty-pants, let's see ya get outen this one! This time, you're a-diving!" However, as soon as Sam cuts through the board, it's the ladder and platform that falls, leaving the cut plank suspended in midair. Bugs turns to the camera and cracks: "I know this defies the law of gravity, but, you see, I never "studied" law!"
  • At the end of "Fastest with the Mostest", Wile E. stares at the Road Runner, still standing on a floating piece of rock, much to Wile E.'s confusion. He pulls out a sign that says, I WOULDN'T MIND, EXCEPT THAT HE DEFIES THE LAW OF GRAVITY!, but the Road Runner holds a sign that says, SURE, BUT I NEVER STUDIED LAW!, as he speeds away.
• Gratuitous French: In every single Pepé Le Pew cartoon. For example, at the start of Wild Over You, an announcer calls out, "Avec, avec!" which translates to "With, with!". Probably also a case of reverse Engrish.
• Green Aesop: Lumber Jerks, where Mac and Tosh's forest home is cut down to make toothpicks and furniture.
• Green Gators: Crocodiles and alligators are always depicted as green.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The hotel owner from Porky Pig's Feat is seen as evil because he prevents Porky and Daffy from leaving the hotel without paying, and is very rude about it, but as the hotel manager, he has a right to be angry that Porky and Daffy are trying to escape without paying their bill, which is the fault of Daffy betting away the money they were supposed to pay with.
• Hair-Trigger Avalanche: Demonstrated in "The Iceman Ducketh" when Daffy accidentally sets off an avalanche by shouting.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Yosemite Sam's schtick. He even rapped about it on The Looney Tunes Show.
• Half-Witted Hillbilly: Curt and Pun'kinhead Martin from the short "Hillbilly Hare" found themselves matching wits with Bugs Bunny. Unfortunately, they're unarmed in that department. Depending on the Writer, Yosemite Sam also qualifies at times.
• Halloween Episode: "Broom-Stick Bunny", "A-Haunting We Will Go", and "Corn on the Cop" all take place on the holiday.
• Halloween Special: Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special is one of those cut-and-paste specials from the '70s, incorporating footage from such shorts as the first two mentioned above as well as "Hyde and Hare", "Hyde and Go Tweet", "Claws for Alarm", "Transylvania 6-5000", etc.
• Hammerspace: Probably the Trope Maker, though not the Trope Namer. Cartoon characters have been pulling silly things out of nowhere since the beginning.
• Handbag of Hurt: In "Boston Quackie", Quackie's girlfriend Mary clobbers the man in the green hat with her handbag. She is carrying an anvil in it...
• Handcar Pursuit
• Handsome Lech: Pepé LePew (Any Charles Boyer-esque French stereotype applies here)
• Hangover Sensitivity:
  • Bugs is assumed to have a hangover at the beginning of "Hare-Way to the Stars":
    Bugs: What a night! I'll never mix radish juice and carrot juice again...
  • The mouse in "The Mouse on 57th Street", after spending all night eating rum cake. To be fair, though, they are jackhammering outside.
• Haplessly Hiding:
  • Invoked in "Bugs and Thugs" — Bugs makes Rocky and Mugsy think the police are coming and suggests that they hide inside the stove; he then turns on the gas and tosses in a match to produce an explosion. Then, the police show up for real and the criminals give themselves up rather than endure a repeat.
  • In "Chain Gangsters", Bugs Bunny is shackled to Rocky and Mugsy, and he gets them to hide in a garbage truck while he's disguised as the driver. Just then, Granny comes by to throw out some anvils, mousetraps and nuclear waste before Bugs lets her turn on the compactor.
• Hard Head
• Harmless Liquefaction:
  • In "Zoom at the Top", trying to thaw himself with a magnifying glass after being frozen by the ACME Instant Icicle Maker does not help Wile E. at all, as it melts him along with the ice.
  • In the Daffy Duck cartoon "Ain't That Ducky?", Daffy and the hunter chasing him keep running into a duckling crying over a briefcase, and their attempts to help him just get rejected. At one point they try to take the briefcase by force and the kid knocks them out cold, causing them to slide down a slope as if they were melting.
• Hat Damage: Done to Foxy in "One More Time" and Daffy in "Ali Baba Bunny".
• The Hat Makes the Man: In "Bugs' Bonnets", random hats fly by and land on Bugs' and Elmer Fudd's heads. Each time they get a new hat, their behavior changes to match it.
• Have a Gay Old Time: Lots of the dialogue in the cartoons were written back when their meanings were innocuous. Just remember that there was a time when "gay" meant "happy and lighthearted," a "dick" was a police officer or a police detective, a "pussy" meant a cat, and "making love" more or less meant just kissing (though the Pepé Le Pew cartoons kinda blurred the line with that one).
  • Let's not forget the title "Boobs in the Woods".
  • Another case is Bugs' and Daffy's references to Elmer or Yosemite Sam as "a poor little Nimrod." It was originally a sarcastic reference to a king mentioned in The Bible as a mighty hunter. However, between the king's relative obscurity (some interpretations place Nimrod at the center of prominent events like the building of the Tower of Babel, but there is dispute on those) and the fact that the two are being obviously insulting, most people think that "nimrod" is generally used to mean "stupid" rather than "capable hunter," and, just like above, most people aren't even aware that calling someone "Nimrod" is supposed to be a joke.
• Heart Beats out of Chest:
  • In the short "The Grey Hounded Hare", this happens with Bugs Bunny upon seeing the fake rabbit used to lure the dogs around the dog track.
  • Also happens to one cat chased by Pepé LePew after she falls into a can of paint and presumably loses her sense of smell.
• Heli-Critter
  • The short "Go Fly a Kit" is about a kitten who was raised by an eagle and learns to fly by spinning its tail. The epilogue shows the kitten as an adult cat with kittens who fly the same way.
  • Bugs Bunny sometimes uses his ears as a propeller.
    • In "Lighter Than Hare", he uses his ears as helicopter propellers to get away from an outer space version of Yosemite Sam.
    • Not always voluntarily, though, as in "Bunny Hugged" where the Crusher wounds up his ears and sends him flying around.
• Hellevator: Not an elevator, but in "Satan's Waitin'", an escalator transports Sylvester to Hell. The escalator makes a return appearance in "Devil's Feud Cake" when Sam first appears in Hell.
• Helping Granny Cross the Street: In one short, Daffy Duck goes on a Candid Camera-type show where he tries to help an old lady cross the street. She hits him with her umbrella all the way.
• Henpecked Husband: Daffy in the appropriately titled "The Henpecked Duck". Daffy again in "His Bitter Half" and Yosemite Sam in "Honey's Money".
• Here We Go Again!: In "Greedy For Tweety", immediately after Sylvester, Tweety, and the bulldog are released from the hospital, they start chasing each other again. Nurse Granny notices this while looking out the window and places the patient cards back in the "in" slots in anticipation of the three being injured again.
  Granny: Que sera sera.
  • In "D'Fightin' Ones", Sylvester and the bulldog finally are free of being linked together after a train cuts their chains. They celebrate after falling into a garbage dump... only to discover they're now connected by the legs by a pipe. They hop down the road as the cartoon ends.
• Heroic Wannabe / Hero with an F in Good: Daffy Duck as Duck Twacy, Drip-Along Daffy, The Masked Avenger, Duck Drake, Stupor Duck, China Jones, Boston Quackie, Joe Monday, Doorlock Holmes, Robin Hood, Duck Dodgers, etc.
• Herr Doktor: Dr. Oro Myicin, a psychiatrist from "Hare Brush", who convinces Bugs Bunny he is really Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire (the real Fudd having run off after tricking Bugs into switching places with him) using psychotropic drugs of some kind on the rabbit.
• Hoarding the Profits: In the short "Yankee Dood It", the king of the elves discovers that some of his subjects have been missing and discovers that they've been enslaved by a shoemaker who relies on them to keep his outdated business competitive. Part of the problem, it transpires, is that the shoemaker believed that as the owner of the business, he was entitled to all the profits, and thus had not invested in new machinery or made any attempt to attract outside investors.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In one Daffy Duck episode, Daffy messes around with a caveman who wants to eat him. The episode ends with Daffy tricking the caveman into poking a hole in a giant duck balloon, and the resulting explosion causing both of them to turn into angels.
  Daffy: You know, maybe that wasn't such a hot idea after all.
• Hollywood Healing
• Hollywood Magnetism: The short "Bugsy and Mugsy", culminates with Bugs putting roller skates on a tied-up Mugsy, then using a magnet under the floor to move Mugsy around...and slam him repeatedly into Rocky. In reality, the magnetic field wouldn't be strong enough to pass through that much wood.
• Hollywood Natives:
  • In "Eight-Ball Bunny", Bugs Bunny and a penguin are caught by a South American tribe and put on a pot. They are saved when the natives are scared away by "el bwana", a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Humphrey Bogart as Fred Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
  • In "Boyhood Daze", Mr. Imagination Ralph Philips has a fantasy of saving his parents from the Dakiris.
• Honest John's Dealership: Acme.
  • Also, Daffy frequently played the role of a pushy door-to-door salesman strong-arming a reluctant character into buying unwanted goods, as in such cartoons as "The Stupor Salesman" and "Design for Leaving".
• How We Got Here: "The Old Grey Hare" features a sequence of Elmer and Bugs as babies when they first met.
• Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: Subverted with Red Hot Ryder from "Buckaroo Bugs" (Clampett, 1944).
• Humanlike Foot Anatomy: Spike and Hector, the two bulldogs, Sylvester the cat, and most other cats and dogs in are shown plantigrade.
  • Porky Pig averts this trope in The Looney Tunes Show by having the unguligrade stance that real pigs have, but he usually appears more digitigrade or plantigrade. Also, Porky Pig normally has feet and hooves shaped like slippers.
  • Speedy Gonzales has two-toed feet that look like rabbit or hare feet.
  • The bird characters Daffy Duck, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk, and Yoyo Dodo have a plantigrade stance, as do most other bird characters. Averted with Roadrunner since he keeps the digitigrade stance that real birds have.
    • Daffy Duck also has feet rather like those of a cat or a rabbit in the '60s shorts.
• Humanlike Hand Anatomy: Looney Tunes loves this trope:
  • Bugs Bunny
  • Daffy Duck
  • Parodied in the short What Makes Daffy Duck where a fox has human like hands. At one point it's revealed they're gloves when they fly off revealing fox paws underneath.
  • Porky Pig, though his hooves can look more shoe-like depending on the design.
• Human Knot: In the short Muscle Tough, Daffy Duck gets his arms tied up in a bow when he attempts some Barehanded Bar Bending with a fishing pole.
• Human Mail: Porky Pig twice tries to get rid of Charlie Dog this way. Charlie always gets sent back, dressed up in the garb of the country he was mailed to.
• Humiliation Conga: There're a lot of examples, but the best one is an early Chuck Jones cartoon called "Good Night Elmer", one of the few cartoons to have Elmer as the star, rather than the antagonist. After doing everything he can to get some sleep — including nearly destroying his room — what should appear outside his window but the sun?
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Three Pepé Le Pew cartoons ("For Scent-imental Reasons," "Little Beau Pepé ," and "Really Scent") end this way, as does "Rabbit Fire" (the first installment of the "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" trilogy) with Bugs and Daffy hunting Elmer after it's revealed that it's neither Rabbit Season nor Duck Season — it's Elmer Season.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • In "Have You Got Any Castles?", the climax of the final chase scene ends with Rip Van Winkle opening up a book literally titled Hurricane which blows everybody away... and then, after everyone's gone, down falls the book Gone with the Wind.
  • "Bugged by a Bee" ends with Cool Cat making a bunch of bee-related puns.
• Hyperspace Arsenal
• Hyperspace Mallet
• Hypnotism Reversal: Wile E. Coyote plans to hypnotize the Road Runner into walking off a cliff and successfully tests the process on a fly. But when he tries it on the Road Runner, the latter holds up a mirror, causing Wile E. to hypnotize himself into walking off a cliff.
• Hypocritical Humor: In "The Heckling Hare", after Willoughby falls off the cliff:
  Bugs: Too bad. Eh, but the jerk had it comin' to him. He oughta watch his step. (not looking where he's going, Bugs falls through a hole in the ground and joins Willoughby)
• I Am Not Weasel: Quite a few shorts focus on Sylvester running into Hippety Hopper, a kangaroo, and assuming that he's a giant mouse. To be fair, though, Hippety DOES look more like a giant mouse than a kangaroo...
• Iconic Sequel Character: Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck didn't appear until almost a decade into the LT/MM run. Several other main stars were also Breakout Characters from later shorts.
• Idea Bulb
• Illogical Safe
• Immune to Slapstick: Yes, even Looney Tunes, the quintessential slapstick cartoon series, has examples of such:
  • A key criticism towards Lola Bunny in her debut in Space Jam, who despite being boosted a new leading character to the franchise, played very little part in the cartoony antics of the original cast (to the point even some of the live action characters fall victim to squash and stretch slapstick more than she does). The one instance she is put at harm by one of the Monstars, it is Played for Drama and averted by Bugs performing a Heroic Sacrifice. The character was revised for The Looney Tunes Show, with the character having a more abrasive personality, albeit still mostly in a dialogue centric sense.
  • Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The Road Runner is one of the few regulars to never be the butt of a gag. While most Looney Tunes protagonists are more frequently dishing out slapstick abuse than taking it, they at least have some exceptional cases. The Road Runner's most distinguishing wacky characteristic was holding up a sign reading his opinions.
• Impossible Insurance: In "Fool Coverage", Daffy is an insurance salesman trying to sell Porky some life insurance. He promises the policy will pay Porky one million dollars for a black eye... provided it was the result of an elephant stampede happening in his house between 3:55 and 4:00 PM on July 4 during a hailstorm. At the end of the cartoon, that is exactly what happens! To try to save face, Daffy adds "and a baby zebra" to the clause. Cue baby zebra.
  • A variation of this occurs in "Boobs In The Woods." After asking Porky if he has a fishing license and a hunting license, Daffy asks if he has "a license to sell hair tonic...to bald eagles...in Omaha, Nebraska." Porky does, oddly enough.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In "You Were Never Duckier", when Daffy Duck(impersonating a rooster to cash in on a poultry contest) encounters Henery Hawk's very large father, wrongly thinking that he was the judge of the poultry contest:
  Daffy: Whoops, gotta go, my judge is burning, fudge, I mean, my fudge is burning, judge, my mother wants me, er, I gotta crochet a cake, um, g'bye!
• Impossible Shadow Puppets: "One Meat Brawl" ends with what looks like a Shadow Discretion Shot of a big fight, but turns out to be the characters using shadow puppets. "That way, no one gets hurt."
• In Another Man's Shoes: "A Waggily Tale", where Junior dreams that he's a dog, learning not to mistreat his own dog.
• Inconvenient Itch: In the short "An Itch In Time", Elmer's dog tries very hard not to scratch a flea bite lest he get the ultimate penalty: a bath!
• Inconvenient Summons: Bugs repeatedly does this to Smokey in "A-Lad-In His Lamp".
• Indestructibility Montage: In "Much Ado About Nutting", a squirrel spends the entire cartoon trying to break open a coconut. Nothing it tries works, culminating in him dropping it from a tall skyscraper and only succeeding in pounding in the pavement below. Once it finally does crack (with only minimum effort), the shell opens to reveal another shell.
• Induced Hypochondria: "Hare Tonic"; "The Hypo-Chondri-Cat"; "Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare"
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Arguably a Trope Codifier, as almost every villain in the series was a moronic Butt-Monkey as likely to fall by their own idiocy as by the actions of the protagonists themselves. Even the rare subversions of this trope (eg. Nasty Canasta, Rocky and Muggsy) ultimately suffered Villain Decay and fell victim to it.
  • The Coyote was, in fact, so sympathetically ineffectual that in many viewers' minds the Road Runner became the real villain of the pieces. Hilariously referenced by "Weird Al" Yankovic in UHF:
    "Okay. Right now I'd like to show you one of my favorite cartoons. It's a sad, depressing story about a pathetic coyote who spends every waking moment of his life in the futile pursuit of a sadistic roadrunner who mocks him and laughs at him as he's repeatedly crushed and maimed! Hope you'll enjoy it!"
• Inescapable Net: Used by Elmer on the Proto-Bugs in Elmer's Candid Camera. He escapes and turns the tables on Elmer via Faking the Dead.
• Inflating Body Gag:
  • In the early short "Hold Anything", a goat bites into a radiator, causing the hot air to inflate it and send it flying like a balloon. Bosko then uses it as an improvised set of bagpipes.
  • In the short "Billboard Frolics", a chick gets inflated with a tire pump while attempting to catch a worm. However, for some reason, this scene is missing on the third volume of Shokus Video's Cartoon Collection series.
  • In "Fastest with the Mostest", Wile E. Coyote tries to blow into a balloon for his latest plan, only for the air to shoot back and inflate him. He desperately grabs the nearest object — a bomb — to stop himself from drifting away but just winds up carrying the bomb as he floats up. Then he deflates and finds himself high in the air, still holding a bomb. Whoops.
  • In "The Daffy Doc", Daffy Duck gets his head stuck in an iron lung. When he takes it out, his head starts inflating and deflating repeatedly. His attempts to stop it only move the inflation to another part of his body. The cartoon ends with both him and Porky Pig getting caught in the iron lung, causing their bodies to inflate all over.
• Informed Species: Many of the characters.
  • Tweety has a large head and feet for a canary.
  • Henery Hawk looks like a brown, harmless bird rather than a hawk.
  • Bosko, one of the first Looney Tunes, is supposed to be an African-American guy, but looks like a monkey.
  • Foxy doesn’t look like a fox, although this is changed in Tiny Toon Adventures.
  • It's really hard to blame Sylvester for mistaking Hippety Hopper for a giant mouse, since Hippety DOES look much more like a giant mouse than a kangaroo. Though it could be justified in that Hippety is still a young joey.
  • The Roadrunner looks nothing like an actual roadrunner.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, and Don Wilson appear (as mice!) in the 1959 short, "The Mouse That Jack Built."
  • Victor Moore voiced his cartoon likeness in 1945's "Ain't That Ducky".
  • The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie's rendition of Satan is basically a Big Red Devil version of his voice actor, Frank Nelson.
• Instant Bandages
• Instant Gravestone: There's a gag in the short "Baseball Bugs" where a player tries to catch a fly ball ("I got it! I got it!"), gets plowed into the ground by it, and a gravestone pops up where he stops (reading: "He got it").
• Instrumental Theme Tune: Sort of. The iconic theme songs, "Merrily We Roll Along" (for Merrie Melodies) and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" (for Looney Tunes) do indeed have lyrics, but they're never used when introducing the shorts. All we hear are the instrumental versions of them.
  • "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" used lyrical variants in Daffy Duck And Egghead and Boobs In The Woods while "Merrily We Roll Along" was performed by an animated Eddie Cantor in Billboard Frolics and Toy Town Hall. Before becoming its theme, "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" was used as background music in a segment of "Porky's Garden" (Avery, 1937).
• Invisible Stomach, Visible Food:
  • The 1939 short "Porky's Movie Mystery" features The Invisible Man eating an apple. Thanks to Cartoon Physics, the chewed-up apple reassembles itself in his stomach, where it remains for the rest of the scene.
  • In the 1952 Bugs Bunny short "Water, Water Every Hare", Bugs turns himself invisible with a bottle of "Vanishing Fluid". While invisible, he chews and swallows a carrot, and the audience can see it being ground to orange meal and falling down his throat.
• Involuntary Dance: In The Wearing of the Grin, Porky is forced to put on some green shoes which make him dance through a nightmare landscape.
• Iris Out: Done at the end of most shorts (the practice lessened around the early '60s, when the series opted for a simpler "fade to black"). In many Bob Clampett shorts, the "iris out" was often accompanied with a cartoony "Beeeuuuyyywwooooooo!" sound effect. A couple subversions:
  • A Fractured Leghorn: The short does an "iris out" during Foghorn's rant. He grabs the iris so he can finish.
    Foghorn: Wouldn't tell 'em I was hungry!
  • Duck Amuck: Daffy, exasperated, says "Let's get this picture started!", to which the short does an "iris out" and "The End" appears. Daffy yells out two Big Nos and pushes the ending card off screen, and the cartoon continues from there.
  • ''Hare Ribbin'" has the dog, after having committed suicide, suddenly rising, stopping the iris out to say "This shouldn't even happen to a dog!", and then the iris out closes in on his nose.
  • Porky the Rainmaker (1936) has the iris closing and a farm duck is inside the black area. He bangs on the darkness, then Porky's arm reaches in and pulls the duck back to the outside.
  • Porky's Garden (1937): Two irises re-open as Porky takes the prize money from the Italian chicken farmer.
  • Ballot Box Bunny (1951) has the iris close in as Bugs takes his turn at Russian Roulette. It opens back up on him to show he ducked out of the way of his shot, then another iris opens to show the shot hit Yosemite Sam.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Where to start? Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Adolf Hitler... and that's just the villains! Trope Codifier.
• It Wasn't Easy: In "The Super Snooper", when Daffy Duck (as detective Duck Drake) is told by a Beverage Hills mansion butler to "walk this way" and mimics the butler's peculiar manner of walking, he turns to us and says, "T'ain't easy!"

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