Trivia / Looney Tunes

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Mel Blanc ad-libbed Taz's distinctive glottal-guttural gargle since no one around while he was recording actually knew what Tasmanian Devils sounded like. While Taz-speak certainly isn't exactly like the actual creature's sounds, actual Tasmanian Devils do make surprisingly low and intimidating noises, (possibly even while just yawning). One could be fooled into assuming Mel Blanc just did a humorous, exaggerated take on the actual Tasmanian Devils' noises because of this.
• Acting for Two:
  • Mel Blanc frequently did the majority of the voices in the series. During the Seven Arts era, Larry Storch would do the same.
  • Daws Butler played both Ralph and Ned in the three Honey-Mousers shorts.
• Adored by the Network:
  • For a show that is not a Nicktoon, Looney Tunes (called Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon on the channel) was treated very well on Nickelodeon with clips appearing in the channel's promos. Yet, Nickelodeon originally had the worst cartoons in their package; they had the post-1960 cartoons and the pre-1943 black and white shorts (these are generally seen as decent but the same can't be said for the 75 redrawn cartoons that came in the package (thankfully, most of these were replaced with computer colorized shorts in 1992)), though they had rights to a handful of 1948-1960 cartoons and they got better cartoons as time went on. It also helps that it is the longest running cartoon on Nickelodeon that is not a Nicktoon, also outrunning several of their Nicktoons. However, Time Warner made Nickelodeon cancel their program and the shorts that aired on Nickelodeon are now in the hands of Cartoon Network. Looney Tunes successor Tiny Toon Adventures was also treated pretty well during its original Nickelodeon run. Same thing can't be said for Animaniacs however...
  • The Bugs Bunny Show was treated very well being not only one of the longest running cartoons, but one of the longest running series period. However, the run ended for two reasons. First off, the network the show was on, ABC, had just been bought by Warner Bros.' biggest rival. The other reason was that Time Warner wanted the shorts to be exclusive to Cartoon Network so it got the same shaft as the Nickelodeon version and ended its 40 year run.
  • In the 1990s and early 2000s, you couldn't go a day on Cartoon Network without seeing Looney Tunes several times a day. They were on nearly every anthology series that was on Cartoon Network at the time (Bugs and Daffy, The Bob Clampett Show and The Acme Hour are just naming a few).
  • As of 2013, you can't go a single day without seeing Looney Tunes three times a day for 2 whole hours (each time) on Boomerang. They were originally removed in 2007 for unknown reasons but when they returned, they started playing them for several times a day. It's had its Screwed by the Network moments on the channel, though. For example, the channel only shows a fraction of the shorts, making these airings very repetitive.
  • HBO Max has a dedicated Looney Tunes section, with over half the library, spanning every decade of the shorts (barring the ones that were banned for having racially insensitive content). However, see Screwed by the Network below.
  • As of 2021, MeTV has made the classic shorts the centerpiece of their morning line-up, running them 6 days a week. Notably, their airings span the complete entirely of the Looney Tunes canon, going from the earliest Harman-Ising shorts to the modern era. The shorts also dominate the Toon in With Me episodes. For example, it's not uncommon for a Toon in With Me episode to show three Looney Tunes shorts, one Tom and Jerry short and one Popeye short.
• Alan Smithee: There were a few shorts where the director was left uncredited, but not because the work was so bad that the director wanted nothing to do with the project (even Norm McCabe put his name on his cartoons, despite revealing that he thought they were awful years later). The uncredited Looney Tunes cartoons were mostly due to the director having been fired or quit and WB Studios at the time had a rule stating that only those who were employed were allowed to have their names in the opening credits of the shorts.
  • There are at least two cartoons that have a true Alan Smithee credit. Both directed by Friz Freleng. "Hollywood Daffy", Freleng refused credit on it after Mike Maltese presented the story and gags. Freleng felt the cartoon was too wild and crazy to suit his own style (something Bob Clampett would have directed), but was obligated to direct it anyway. This is why the cartoon has no director's credit. Freleng also isn't credited on "Dough for the Do-Do", a color remake of Bob Clampett's "Porky in Wackyland". Freleng felt it was based on Clampett's idea, and he felt it would be plagiarism if he credited the cartoon as his own.
    • A correspondent at Facebook says that Freleng was suspended for a month after a run-in with the Warners front office over "Hollywood Daffy" and his refusal to direct it. Hawley Pratt wound up directing it, but was never credited.
  • 1942's "Crazy Cruise" is uncredited; Tex Avery started it, but was fired after the "Heckling Hare Ending" incident. Robert Clampett finished it. Avery is also uncredited on the banned cartoon "All This And Rabbit Stew," which he directed.
  • Frank Tashlin goes uncredited in "Hare Remover" (1945). He went under "Frank Tash" and "Tish Tash" in his earlier cartoons. ^note  Tashlin's choosing to use his nickname in the credits of his early cartoons stems from the fact he was of German descent; his true surname was von Taschlein. Considering what was brewing and the anti-German sentiments ruling in the 1930s, one can see why he would opt for such a decision.
  • 1934's "Those Were Wonderful Days" and "Pettin' in the Park" both credit then-regular musical director Bernard Brown as the actual director of the cartoons, which virtually everyone involved with the studio back then denies was even remotely the case. The most commonly accepted theory is that these were actually the first two cartoons directed by Frank Tashlin, but he had quit the studio (temporarily; he returned the following year) before they were released, resulting in Brown being credited for whatever reason.
  • Bob Clampett's final short, 1946's The Big Snooze, didn't credit him. However, it's been widely known that he directed it (and even if it wasn't, you could still tell it was his pretty easily.)
• Approval of God: Eddie Cantor, the singer who introduced "Merrily We Roll Along" (which became the opening theme of Merrie Melodies and later the Bootstrapped Theme of the franchise as a whole), was reportedly fond that it became the theme of "those cute cartoons".
• Black Sheep Hit: The five Looney Tunes shorts to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film (Tweetie Pie, For Scent-imental Reasons, Speedy Gonzales, Birds Anonymous, Knighty Knight Bugs) are generally viewed as So Okay, It's Average by fans and historians alike, with Birds Anonymous being the only one of the five to get included in the book The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons.
• Bury Your Art: The infamous Censored Eleven shorts have been suppressed from home video and television airings out of shame over the high amounts of Values Dissonance present in them.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The United Press International obituary for Mel Blanc in 1989 reported that "The voice of Elmer Fudd, often attributed to Blanc, was actually done by Cliff Nazarro." Nazarro did some voices for the studio (mainly celebrity impressions), but never did Elmer's voice, which Arthur Q. Bryan originated and did until his death in 1959. And Blanc did reluctantly do Elmer's voice a few times after Bryan died. The Associated Press obituary wrongly listed Elmer among the voices that Blanc "invented". What makes these examples especially odd is that Blanc's autobiography That's Not All, Folks (which should've been a prime source for his obituary) came out a few months before his death, and not only talked about Bryan voicing Elmer, but included an old publicity photo of Blanc and Bryan together.
• Creative Differences: Bob Bergen had an awful time working on the Doyle shorts before being fired and replaced by Billy West as the voice of Porky and Tweety.
  • For one thing, the shorts originally had plenty of adult humor that didn't belong in a Looney Tunes cartoon - he specifically mentioned a lot of jokes about sex and bodily functions. While Bob is aware that the original Looney Tunes shorts were never intended to be exclusively for children, as he pointed out they were classy, not crude. Thus, he let Larry know that he wasn't comfortable with the adult humor, but it didn't do any good (ironically, the higher-ups at Warner Bros. took out all the adult humor in the shorts after Larry was fired).
  • As if that wasn't enough, Larry wanted Bob to change the way he played Porky - he slowed down a bunch of old Porky shorts to how Mel sounded before they sped him up, then told Bob to "do" Mel, then they would speed him up to the same percentage, despite the fact that Bob does Porky just fine naturally and has done it that way for years. In addition, as Bob pointed out his voice is much higher than Mel's was - and the microphones used in those days were much different than the ones they were using on these shorts... and on top of that, Larry slowed down those original Porky shorts too much. When Bob attempted to do Porky the way Larry wanted and was sped-up, the result sounded like a stuttering chipmunk.
  • Bob finally decided to call up his agent and quit the project - a very difficult decision for him, as he had wanted to voice Porky since he was a child, but if this was the direction that they were going to take the characters in, he wanted no part in it. However, when he told his agent that he wanted off the project, his agent informed him that he had actually just been fired. Fortunately, it didn't take long for him to get the role of Porky back, just not in the Larry Doyle shorts.
• Creator's Apathy: Jack L. Warner, one of the original Warner Brothers and head of the studio during The Golden Age of Animation, openly didn't care about his company's cartoons or its animation department, seeing their popular shorts as just an extraneous service to sell to theaters who wanted a full program. In a lack of foresight, Warner sold all of his company's pre-1948 color shorts for $3000 a piece. Biographer Bob Thomas would later remark that the sold shorts "have since earned millions, but not for Warner Bros." Those shorts did eventually return to Warner Bros., though, as they, through a series of transactions over the decades, came to be owned by Ted Turner, who merged his company with Time Warner in 1996.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Chuck Jones disowned almost all of his pre-1948 shorts; it was claimed that if he had the chance, he would have burned the negatives to all of them.
  • Friz Freleng, who animated on the Bosko cartoons before becoming the main director of Looney Tunes, said years later that he didn't think much of the cartoons in hindsight, feeling that Bosko had no personality and that Harman-Ising were more concerned with polishing their art instead of making interesting characters. And apparently, none of the original animators liked working on the Buddy cartoons.
  • Tex Avery and Friz Freleng also hated having to deal with Warner Bros. mandate of including a song number in every Merrie Melodies short, which they felt got in the way of their story ideas and undermined the gags, and felt their cartoons significantly improved once the mandate was dropped in the late 30's.
  Tex: "We were forced to use a song, which would just ruin the cartoon. You'd try like a fool to get funny (during the song), but it was seldom you did....Finally, when Schlesinger let us get by (without using the songs), the cartoons started picking up."
  • Additionally, Frank Tashlin strongly disliked making shorts of Porky Pig, due to having less flexibility and humor value compared to characters such as Bugs Bunny.
  • Similarly, Friz Freleng disliked pitting Bugs Bunny against Elmer Fudd, stating Elmer was so pitiful and unthreatening an antagonist that Bugs looked unheroic duping him. He created other more vicious adversaries such as Yosemite Sam so he wouldn't have to deal with their feud and could give Bugs a more Worthy Opponent.
  • Robert McKimson claimed he wasn't fond of the later revised characterisations of the main stars spearheaded by Chuck Jones. He disliked his take on Bugs in particular, feeling he had made him too suave and underplayed, and that by the late 50s he had barely any personality (Freleng was also concerned about Bugs' waning character, joking that he had "gotten old" over time). This seemed to be evident with Daffy as well, since McKimson conformed to the egotistical Butt-Monkey that Jones made him at a much slower rate than everyone else. This interview with his son also states that he did not think highly of the final batch of shorts he directed during the 1964-1969 Audience-Alienating Era either, hating the new characters, Executive Meddling, and the dismal budgets he was stuck with.
  • Bob Bergen, the current voice of Porky Pig, admitted on the Toonzone Forums (now the Anime Superhero Forums) that he does not think highly of the Larry Doyle-produced shorts made in the 2000s; he had planned on bailing on the project before his agent called him and told him he'd been dismissed from the Doyle shorts.
  • The esoteric director Norm McCabe grew to despise every short he directed, dismissing them all as terrible (though a lot of his shorts aren't seen much today, as they're all very dated — particularly his World War II-era shorts like The Ducktators and Tokio Jokio which are seen more as historical artifacts rather than cartoons you can watch for fun^note unless you're really into World War II history). According to this, McCabe liked the three shorts he did with Daffy Duck.
  • According to Mark Kausler's commentary on The Daffy Doc, both Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones (the former being the director, Jones being an animator at the time) grew to hate that short, not because they thought it was a bad cartoon, but because it used an iron lung for a gag prop, which they felt was in bad taste to those who suffered from polio.
  • The mid-to-late 1960's shorts, which are widely viewed as the nadir of the franchise by critics and fans alike, with the majority of the shorts in that era rarely appearing on home video or television and the new characters introduced in them almost entirely phased-out to never be acknowledged again. The sole exceptions are Cool Cat and Colonel Rimfire, who both prominently appeared on The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries and Tweety's High Flying Adventure as well as the Looney Tunes Cartoons short "Happy Birthday, Bugs Bunny!".
  • Cartoon Network and Boomerang feel this way about the Speedy Gonzales cartoons considering they dropped them completely in 1999 due to their Mexican stereotyping. After backlash from Hispanics who had fond memories of watching Speedy Gonzales growing up, Cartoon Network returned them to rotation in 2002 and kept them in until 2004, when they dropped them entirely once again. When the Looney Tunes shorts returned full time in 2011, Speedy's cartoons were rarely aired at all, even when the shorts were brought back to Boomerang in 2013, after dropping them in 2007. "Cannery Woe" did sporadically air on Boomerang from 2014 to 2016, before being dropped altogether. Only one short, "Nuts and Volts" was available on HBO Max, but has been removed as of February 2021. Though, as of 2021, some Speedy shorts have aired on MeTV, making it the first time in roughly 15 years Speedy shorts have consistently been shown on American TV.
• Creator's Pest: The animation staff hated working on the Buddy shorts. Bob Clampett in particular referred to Buddy as "Bosko in whiteface". Buddy himself would be unceremoniously phased out towards the end of his tenure. His last four cartoons beginning with "Buddy's Bug Hunt" had his intended replacement Beans the Cat signing off with "That's All, Folks!".
• Crossdressing Voices: Many young boy characters were voiced by women in the early years, most noticeably Margaret Hill-Talbot and Marjorie Talton as Sniffles. Occasionally, Mel Blanc would voice a minor or one-off female character when Bea Benaderet and June Foray were unavailable, and it would often sound very much like one of Mel's male Looney Tunes characters was Disguised in Drag (most notably Bugs Bunny.)
• Dawson Casting: Many children characters in the original cartoons were voiced by adults. A notable example is Tweety, voiced by Mel Blanc with his voiced pitch-shifted to sound more childlike. In the early days, many young boys were voiced by women, as mentioned above. And Dick Beals, who had a hormonal condition that prevented his voice from deepening during adolescence (not unlike Gary Coleman), voiced Ralph Phillips.
• Died During Production: It's interesting to imagine what Milt Franklyn might've come up with for the remaining 3-4 minutes of "The Jet Cage" had he not died while scoring it.
• Doing It for the Art: As Chuck Jones himself said, "We didn't make them for anybody, we made them for ourselves, which was probably the most sensible way to do it anyway." To put things in perspective, the animators were grossly underpaid, especially considering some of the things they ended up turning out, but knew that asking for a raise would mean giving up their creative control.
• Enforced Method Acting: This happened in the Japanese-dubbed version, when it was dubbed for first time: According to Jacques Barreau, a France-based Warner Bros. employee sent to Japan to supervise the dub, Mugihito (Taz's Japanese VA and its current one) had too many problems at first with dubbing Taz right, since Taz barely spoke any reasonable lines and adapting his Hulk Speak to Japanese was becoming a pain for him and he was starting to get frustrated. Since Mugihito didn't speak English nor Barreau spoke Japanese to help him, the Frenchman decided to enter into Mugihito's recording booth and started to imitate Taz as best he could, so the Japanese voice actor could be able to understand how to dub Taz right. After laughing really hard after that stunt, Mugihito got the message quickly and managed to solve the issue right away.
• Executive Meddling: Happened on occasion, especially after Eddie Selzer took over the studio.
  • Perhaps the most infamous example is the ending of "The Heckling Hare", originally it ended with Bugs Bunny and the dog falling off a cliff three times(as opposed to just one in the released version) for whatever reason Jack Warner did not like the ending (speculated reasons why range from Jack not liking the implication of Bugs falling to his death to not being comfortable with the line "Hold on to your hats folks here we go again!" which was a well-known risque joke at the time) and Leon Schlesinger didn't like to argue with his boss so he demanded Avery change the ending and as a result the final 40 feet of the cartoon was trimmed, which made Avery furious. The original ending alas seems to be a Missing Episode.
  • When Bob Clampett started out as a director, he was only allowed to make black-and-white Porky Pig cartoons. Tellingly, more than half of his filmography (44 black-and-white cartoons, and four color shorts) is made up of appearances of the character. Fortunately, Clampett was allowed to use Daffy Duck alongside Porky in those shorts, and he did not take that for granted. Also of note is that, while Porky was mandated to appear in every early short he made, it was never stipulated how much he had to appear—Clampett took advantage of this in the later black-and-white shorts by demoting Porky to fairly minor roles in favor of his own custom cast of characters (i.e. Porky is a narrator in "We, The Animals Squeak"). By 1941, Clampett inherited Tex Avery's unit after he quit the studio, allowing to experiment with more shorts starring Bugs and Daffy, in addition to creating his own characters such as Tweety Bird. Tellingly, Porky only appeared in six of his color cartoons, two of which were remakes of previous Porky shorts (1944's Tick Tock Tuckered and 1945's Wagon Heels), and one of them was only a very brief cameo in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery.
  • The infamous Daffy/Speedy pairing in the mid-to-late 60s were a result of this. In 1964, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales were the three most popular characters in the Looney Tunes series. Television companies, thus, demanded more cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales (who, at this point, had only starred in about 20 cartoons). Unfortunately, since the newly-reopened Warner Brothers Animation Studio had a very limited budget (due in no small part to the Fall of the Studio System), they decided to kill two birds with one stone and pair the two characters rather than continue their cartoons separately.
• Executive Veto: Eddie Selzer would routinely tell the animators what they couldn't do cartoons about. This backfired considerably, as a) the cartoons got made anyway, and b) the five Oscars won over the years (e.g. For Scent-imental Reasons) were won by cartoons they were specifically told not to make.
  • For quite a while in the early 2000's, Warner Bros. had a strict "No dates" policy, because they fear audiences won't care about the characters if they knew how old they are. It was also to ward off people who want to find out which of their cartoons are Public Domain or not (even though that info can easily be found online). This was also given as a reason why they would not release chronological DVD sets of the various Looney Tunes characters. However, new management reversed that policy, which allowed Porky Pig 101 and the Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Blu-ray set to be made.
• Exiled from Continuity:
  • Foxy and Roxy the Foxes, who were a blatant attempt at ripping off Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, were barred from appearing again after their three appearances in the Merrie Melodies series, due to Walt Disney ordering then-co director of the series, Rudy Ising, to stop using the characters under the threat of a lawsuit. The characters would only resurface decades later in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, and even then they had to be completely redesigned so that they would no longer resemble Mickey and/or Minnie.
  • According to one of the Looney Tunes comic artists, celebrity caricatures are OK with them unless noted otherwise, even for ones long forgotten such as Edna Mae Oliver, but there is one egregious exception—anything caricaturing actor Peter Lorre, who was a fairly common sight in the older Looney Tunes. When the artist attempted to have him appear in the Mad Scientist role he played in Hair Raising Hare for a story, it was shot down due to legal issues with Lorre's estate, who have said they will no longer authorize using caricatures of him in that context. So the scientist from Water, Water Every Hare was added to substitute for him.^note Made ironic by the scientist being modeled after Boris Karloff instead. Despite this, he reappeared in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
  • The Gremlin from Falling Hare is not allowed to make appearances in modern Looney Tunes works due to a legal snafu regarding him. Apparently, the character is public domain due to him appearing in a wartime cartoon produced for the government, but the Gremlin Fine Arts Gallery took advantage of this and claimed a trademark on the characters name and likeness, meaning Warner Bros. would have to pay royalties to them to use their own character. ^note Which is odd given that said character once appeared in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, and thus technically appeared in a current copyrighted WB work. At least until 2020, when the Gremlin returned in Looney Tunes Cartoons.
  • In The '80s and 90s, Cartoon Network and other stations would flat-out refuse to air Speedy Gonzales cartoons and would also exclude Speedy from major Looney Tunes projects, even going as far as to replace him with Sylvester Jr. in the opening credits of The Bugs Bunny Show due to concerns of him being an Ethnic Scrappy towards Mexicans. When it was revealed that Mexicans see the little mouse as a positive role model, Speedy was brought back as a Looney regular.
  • Pepé Le Pew suffered this in 2021. Due to his behavior, Pepe was called out online and Warner Bros. removed him from Space Jam: A New Legacy and the Annecy remake of the Looney Tunes Cartoons short "Happy Birthday, Bugs Bunny!". It unfortunately extended to his object of affection Penelope Pussycat, who was teased as being a member of the Tune Squad in the Xbox trailer for New Legacy, but ended up not appearing in the final version of the film either.
• He Also Did:
  • Leon Schlesinger, founder of the Warner animation studio and the producer up to 1944, also produced several of John Wayne's early B-Westerns in the 1932-33 period.
  • Bill Meléndez worked at the studio from 1941-51 as an animator under Bob Clampett, then later Robert McKimson.
  • Long before his Filmation days, Lou Scheimer briefly worked as a layout artist at Warner around 1958.
• Jews Playing Nazis: Being the Man of a Thousand Voices he is, during any of the Wartime Cartoons that featured Hitler, he was voiced by Mel Blanc, a born Jew, making an absolute mockery out of him.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While a large chunk of the filmography is on VHS, laserdisc, DVD and Blu-Ray (627 of the original 1000 shorts are available on DVD and Blu-Ray, and if you count all home video releases, there are well over 750 available) there are still a large number of the shorts that either haven't seen a home video release or have never been aired on TV (be it in a long time or never). The Censored Eleven films are the most infamous shorts in regards to this.
  • The Bugs Bunny Show is arguably the worst case of all. Only one complete episode was released on DVD ^Note(on Saturday Morning Cartoons- The 60's, vol. 2) and only a handful of bridging sequences were featured as extras on the first five Golden Collection sets. Other than that, bupkis. Part of this is because the original film elements are hard to come by, either because of tape re-use or just badly damaged prints in general. It didn't help that purists originally thought of the episodes as being hack jobs of the original cartoons, ignoring the original animation in the bridging segments, and that the later versions of the series were just the shorts.
  • Capitol Records' children's novelty records featuring the Looney Tunes (this was before WB branched out to the recorded music business themselves) have been out of print for more than half a century, and while copies aren't too hard to find, a lot of them haven't held up well condition-wise. Making matters worse is that Capitol parent Universal Music actually owns the recordings, not WB, so any reissue will need both parties' cooperation.
• Kids' Meal Toy:
  • Not strictly a kids' meal example, but in The '70s Pepsi had a very popular promotion in conjunction with several different fast food chains where you could order a Pepsi in a collectible drinking glass with a character on them, with nearly 20 glasses total, which, besides the obvious stars, also included more obscure characters like Beaky Buzzard, Cool Cat and Slow Poke Rodriguez.
  • KFC released a set of four pull-back cars in the UK in 1990. These consisted of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd.
  • McDonald's released figures of Bugs, Daffy, Petunia and Taz with snap-on superhero costumes in 1991, and crazy cars of Bugs, Daffy, Taz, and Porky in 1992. A Canadian promotion in the 1992 holiday season featured plushes of Bugs, Taz, Tweety, and Sylvester. A Looney Tunes-themed train car was also part of the Happy Birthday Happy Meal in 1994, which also had toys based on Ronald and Friends, Barbie, Hot Wheels, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Little Mermaid (1989), 101 Dalmatians, Cabbage Patch Kids, Tonka, The Berenstain Bears, Muppet Babies (1984), Peanuts, Tiny Toon Adventures, and the Happy Meal Guys. In 1996 in Europe, a set of four train cars was released. This promotion featured a re-issue of the Bugs and Daffy toy that was included with the Happy Birthday Happy Meal, Tweety having locked Sylvester in a washing machine, Taz spinning through a crate, and Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner.
  • At Subway, the franchise got clip-on toys of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Marvin the Martian, Taz the Tasmanian Devil, and Foghorn Leghorn in late 1999 to promote Mil-Looney-um 2000.
  • Burger King had a set of eight character figures dressed as DC Comics characters in 2023 to celebrate 100 Years of Warner Bros.. There was Bugs Bunny as Superman, Lola Bunny as Wonder Woman, Daffy Duck as Batman, Taz as Cyborg, Sylvester as The Joker, Porky Pig as Robin, Tweety as Harley Quinn, and Road Runner as The Flash.
• Meme Acknowledgment: Warner Bros seems to acknowledge the "Big Chungus" meme that they posted a snippet of the original short "Wabbit Twouble" on their Kids YouTube channel. Adding to that is the thumbnail includes the chubby Bugs Bunny. Even better, when the moment in question happens, an annotation straight up asks "Are you here for this?", solidifying that WB knows the meme.
• Money, Dear Boy:
  • The whole reason Warner Bros. started their own animation unit was to cash in on the recent success of Disney and the Fleischers and the studio heads really didn't care what the cartoon was about or how good it was, so long as it could make them some extra money. This was good for the artists, however, who were inadvertently given carte blanche over anything they created.
  • The reason Mel Blanc's name is the only one seen in the voice credits for most of the cartoons, even the ones where there are obviously other actors, was because he was denied a raise.
• No Budget: The black-and-white Looney Tunes directed by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett had very small budgets of $3,000 (around $50,000 in 2016 money) and strict deadlines of four weeks to slam together each cartoon!
• The Other Darrin: Quite a few examples, actually:
  • The first example came after only three cartoons, when the original voice of Bosko, Max Maxwell was replaced by John Murray.
  • Mel Blanc replaced Joe Dougherty as the voice of Porky Pig starting in 1937.
  • June Foray replaced Bea Benaderet as the voice of many female characters, including Granny and Witch Hazel, starting around 1955.
    • Speaking of Granny, she was voiced by Joan Gerber in "Corn on the Cop" and by GeGe Pearson in "It's Nice to Have a Mouse Around the House".
  • Julie Bennett replaced Bea Benaderet as the voice of Miss Prissy in 1961's "Strangled Eggs".
  • Kent Rogers originally voiced Beaky Buzzard and Junior Bear. After his fatal plane crash, Beaky was voiced by Mel Blanc and Junior was voiced by Stan Freberg.
  • Billy Bletcher usually voiced Henry Bear, but Mel Blanc filled in for "What's Brewin', Bruin?".
  • Dave Barry took over the role of Elmer Fudd for one cartoon (1958's Pre-Hysterical Hare) after regular actor Arthur Q. Bryan joined in that year's musicians' strike and refused to work.
  • Hal Smith briefly replaced Arthur Q. Bryan (who passed away) as Elmer Fudd from 1960 to 1961 ^Note(on the shorts "Dog Gone People" and "What's My Lion?", as well as a few Post Alpha-Bits commercials), and in the '70s and '80s television specials and movies, Mel Blanc replaced Hal Smith in the role. ^Note(Blanc also voiced Elmer in one episode of The Bugs Bunny Show)
  • In "Good Night, Elmer" and "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", Elmer Fudd is voiced by Mel Blanc rather than Arthur Q. Bryan. Justified in the latter cartoon, since he's acting out a role in Daffy's Fantasy Sequence.
  • Larry Storch replaced Daws Butler as the voices of Merlin the Magic Mouse and Second Banana after their initial appearance.
  • After Mel Blanc died, numerous other voice artists have filled in for his various characters, including his son Noel, Jeff Bergman, Greg Burson, Bob Bergen, Joe Alaskey, Billy West, Frank Gorshin, Bill Farmer, Jim Cummings, Dee Bradley Baker, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen, Frank Welker, Jeff Bennett, Fred Tatasciore, Keith Ferguson, J.P. Karliak and Eric Bauza.
• Outlived Its Creator: All of the original creators and directors responsible for the shorts are dead, with the last major one (Chuck Jones) passing away in 2002. The original shorts are still played on TV today and also live on through DVD collections, new shorts, and direct-to-DVD movies, as well as (legal) internet streaming.
• Out of Holiday Episode: Broom-Stick Bunny is a Halloween Episode, but it was released February 25 1956.
• The Pete Best:
  • Joe Dougherty was Porky's original voice actor until his dismissal in 1937. He was replaced by Mel Blanc, who would go on to voice him until his death in 1989.
  • To a lesser extent, Bea Benaderet, while being known for many other productions, was the original voice of Granny, but June Foray is more remembered for voicing her, as she voiced her until 2013.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For years, there has been a rumor that Noel Blanc, Mel's son, briefly filled in for Mel after his near-fatal car accident in 1961. Noel more or less debunked this in a radio interview and clarified that he merely did "ghost tracks", and then his father re-recorded everything after he recovered.
• Post-Release Retitle: To comply with TV censorship guidelines during the 1970s, the shorts Curtain Razor and Prince Violent were renamed Show Stoppers and Prince Varmint, respectively.
• Reality Subtext: You Ought to Be in Pictures is arguably one of Friz Freleng's most personal films, because it's essentially a cartoon re-telling of Friz's experiences quitting WB to work for MGM, then being dissatisfied and returning to WB only a couple years later.
• Recycled Script: Several early black-and-white shorts were later remade in color:
  • Porky's Badtime Story (1937 with Gabby Goat) as Tick Tock Tuckered (1944 with Daffy Duck)
  • Injun Trouble (1938) as Wagon Heels (1945)
  • Scalp Trouble (1938) as Slightly Daffy (1944)
  • Notes To You (1941 with Porky and unnamed cat) as Back Alley Oproar (1947 with Elmer and Sylvester)
  • Porky's Pooch (1941) as Little Orphan Airedale (1947)
  • Porky in Wackyland (1938) as Dough For The Do-Do (1949)
    • Friz Freleng's cartoons are notorious for recycling scripts from earlier cartoons (and recycling scenes).
• Same Content, Different Rating: When America first launched its TV rating system in the 1990s, the Looney Tunes cartoons were normally rated TV-Y^note back before that was used as a rating for preschool and early childhood TV shows. TV-Y7 is normally used now for kids' shows since most of them contain humor that's either too rude, gross, or suggestive to show to kids under seven; action violence that might be too intense for younger viewers, or, in the case of educational shows with this rating, experiments and subject matter considered too dangerous or advanced for younger viewers, even though some shorts did feature slapstick and suggestive humor that wasn't censored by the network^note also, the free-TV networks and Nickelodeon mostly aired Warner Bros. shorts made after 1948, which were more child- and family-friendly than what was made before then, not counting the really early shorts that were little more than plotless musicals that tried to emulate Disney's animation or any of the shorts that were banned — namely, The Censored Eleven. On Cartoon Network and Boomerang, the Looney Tunes shorts are rated TV-G^note suitable for all audiences; normally given to family-friendly and general interest shows that have little to no inappropriate content, despite that most Looney Tunes would be rated TV-PG for outdated racial stereotypes, using Suicide as Comedy, and some scenes featuring Male Gaze fanservice^note most of which does get censored on those two channels and others. The Looney Tunes DVD collections (The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, The Looney Tunes Platinum Collection, Looney Tunes Superstars, etc) are unrated, but do include a warning about the content being considered offensive due to Values Dissonance, while the select shorts that are streaming on HBO Max are either rated TV-Y7 or TV-PG.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • The failure of Looney Tunes: Back in Action directly caused the theatrical release of new Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry shorts to be cancelled (the former would later be released on DVD and the latter was scrapped entirely), the merchandise to stop completely and the old Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies to be removed from Cartoon Network in late 2004 with the only reruns airing on Boomerang which were later removed in 2007 (this removed them from TV for a good 2 years until they were slowly added back on Cartoon Network in 2009 and Boomerang in 2013). This also indirectly caused reruns of The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries to be removed from Cartoon Network (this probably also prevented the show from airing reruns on Boomerang when Baby Looney Tunes and Duck Dodgers moved in 2005), Baby Looney Tunes to take an incredibly long hiatus before eventually burning off the rest of its episodes in late 2005, and Duck Dodgers to move and quietly premiere its final episodes on Boomerang.
  • On December 31, 2022, HBO Max removed half of the classic shorts from its service (specifically, the ones released from 1950 to 2004) due to the expiration of a licensing agreement with Warner Bros. the streamer chose not to renew. Max is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, so why there was a licensing agreement in the first place is unexplained.
• Sending Stuff to Save the Show: When Warner Bros. shelved the completed live-action/animated film Coyote Vs Acme in November 9, 2023 for a $30 million tax break after doing so with Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt in 2022, this proved to be the last straw for filmmakers working for the studio, several fans and other creatives in Hollywood, who have finally had enough and worked to teach the studio a lesson. Steven Ray Byrd, a background actor from the film, made a petition pleading for the film to see the light of day, while several filmmakers protested by leaving angry phone calls at Warner Bros., cancelling meetings scheduled at the studio and even writing tweets on Twitter / X ranging from praising the film to panning Warner Bros.' decision to shelve it. Meanwhile, fans also made fanart campaigning for the film to be released and attacking CEO David Zaslav, and even Texas congressman Joaquin Castro got in on the criticism, deeming Warner Bros.' write-off practices "predatory" and "anti-competitive" and calling for a federal investigation into the studio. Their determination and rebellion eventually paid off, as four days later on November 13, 2023, after enduring negative feedback, Warner Bros. appeared to have waved the white flag and reversed course, unshelving the film and allowing the crew to shop it to other distributors. Then, on New Year's Eve, Eric Bauza took to social media to unveil the first screenshot of the film and implied its eventual release in 2024. Unfortunately, on February 8, 2024, it was revealed by The Wrap that the announcement to unshelve the film was little more than a PR stunt to quell the angry protests and that Warner Bros. still fully intends to quietly shelve and write off the film anyway, backstabbing the film's crew in the process.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: In November 2023, it was announced that the live-action hybrid film Coyote vs. ACME, which had filmed the year prior and was ready to release, would permanently shelved for a tax writeoff of $30 million, a similar fate to that which befell several other fellow Warner Bros. films under David Zaslav's administration of Warner Bros. Discovery. However, in a happy turn of events, the film was brought back after Warner Bros. received nothing but severe backlash for their decision from fans, filmmakers in the entertainment industry^note (several of whom cancelled meetings with the studio to express their spite for the decision, with one in particular, Brian Duffield of No One Will Save You fame, outright stating he will not work with Warner Bros. any time soon) and even Texas congressman Joaquin Castro^note (who called Warner Bros.' tactics "predatory" and "anti-competitive" and called for a federal investigation), and is now being offered to other distributors such as Prime Video, Netflix and Paramount, all the way up to Eric Bauza unveiling the first official screenshot of the film on his Twitter / X account on New Year's Eve and implying a 2024 release of the film. Unfortunately, the film would go back to being shelved on February 8, 2024, with reports implying that Warner Bros. was never going to unshelve it in the first place.
• Technical Advisor: Parodied in A Gander at Mother Goose, where the opening credits read "Technical Advisor: Mother Goose".
• Uncredited Role: For many years, Mel Blanc received no onscreen credit for all the voices he did, as it was standard industry practice not to credit actors in short cartoons. Blanc only was given a credit after asking for a raise. His bosses refused to give him one but grudgingly agreed to put his name in the credits. Of the other, uncredited actors, the most notorious example was Arthur Q. Bryan, who voiced Elmer Fudd in over fifty cartoons but was never given on-screen credit, at least not until the '80s compilation films.
  • This applied to animation staff, too; as typical for the time, only the heads of each department were credited- head animators, background artist, layout artist, writer, and composer/musical director. This left out many people, such as inbetween artists, inkers, film editors, etc.
  • Every director, artist and even Mel Blanc became this when certain cartoons were reissued as Blue Ribbon cartoons.
• Wag the Director: While "Porky's Super Service" and "Porky and Gabby" were supervised by Ub Iwerks, it's generally agreed that those two shorts were really directed by then-animators Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett.
• What Could Have Been: Has its own page.
• Writer Revolt: Leon Scheslinger's replacement, Eddie Selzer, had a lot of issues with some of the cartoons being turned out in the late 1940s/early 1950s, citing some of the ideas as not being funny enough for a general audience — the ones Selzer really had issues with were the Pepe Le Pew cartoons and the idea of having Bugs square off against a bull during a bullfight ("Bully for Bugs"). "Bully for Bugs" has become one of many classic cartoon shorts Looney Tunes fans remember from beginning to end, and the 1949 Pepé Le Pew cartoon "For Scent-imental Reasons" won an Oscar (which — ironically, and rather hypocritically — Selzer accepted).
  • In an interview, one of the main writers said that it got to the point where if Selzer rejected an idea, they knew it was a good one.

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