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

Jerry never spoke, but Tom did have a working voice, and there were times where he could scream, sneeze, laugh, and have occasional isolated lines for the sake of a joke (Doug Walker loves the "Don't you believe it" gag quite a lot). However, the directors were wise never to turn him into a character remembered for talking.

Whenever he laughed, yeah...for some reason in the Chuck Jones shorts he was given two weird laughs, one of which was a pitched version of the laugh they used for Tom.

Jerry actually did talk in a few shorts, though due to the content in both of them, both shorts are rarely, if ever, shown in syndication.

One was the short that notoriously centered with Tom, depressed from losing a female cat he fancied to Butch, gave up and decided to sit on a railroad and waited for a train to arrive. Jerry was the narrator for most of the short, in which he explained the backstory as to why Tom was in the state he was in.

Another short when Jerry spoke was when he gets Tom kicked out of the hard, but eventually gets bored / ends up missing him, and sets up a deal to get him back into the house. That short has a scene where he edits a cat on one of Tom's dishes to look like Hitler and spits on it (which is sometimes edited out on some airings).

edited 8th Jul '16 10:28:35 AM by Yeow95

Thanks to the Nostalgia Critic, that short is strong in my mind.

Right, I remember that now...there's a cartoon where, in trying to elude Tom, Jerry puts on blackface and dresses up like Aunt Jemima (or perhaps Mammy Two-Shoes, in this case) and has a one-sided conversation with Tom, all in dialect (he keeps calling Tom "Mr.Thomas"). I remember seeing that one on TV a long, long time ago when I was a little kid.

Yeah, I can imagine they ain't letting that one out. Unless you can find it online.

edited 9th Jul '16 9:57:01 AM by Robbery

I forgot, doesn't that Clip Show short where Jerry writes a tell all book on Tom include brief 'Jerry' voiceovers leading into each segment? I know the Spanish dub version does, and they used the same voice used in the Suicidal Jerry cartoon. But I don't know about the original.

No, no it doesn't.

This thread has existed for how long and nobody bothered to bring up this announced all the way back in April?

I'm less intrigued by the fact that there's going to be a new animated Scooby Doo theatrical film and more the fact that WB wants to make a new cinematic universe based around Hanna-Barbera properties. As someone who grew up watching a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons on Cartoon Network and Boomerang, I find this highly interesting. I just hope they'll actually be intelligently written and not be like, say, 2010's Yogi Bear.

This could mean we could maybe see a Jonny Quest action movie, a new Jetsons movie, or, heck, maybe even an animated film about Quick Draw Mc Graw.

Thoughts?

edited 24th Aug '16 2:22:18 PM by kablammin45

They've been teasing us with rumors about a live-action Jonny Quest film for years.

I was gonna question why there hasn't been a shared Looney Tunes universe.

.... because there IS. There always have been, even in the days of the original shorts! Its just that we're not getting a lot of grand productions featuring the characters anymore.

It seems that since the DC cinematic universe ain't doing too well, they have to use the next best thing...

It isn't without precedent, though. There are several shows involving the H-B characters crossing over (Yogis Gang, Yogis Treasure Hunt, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones), so needless to say it could actually work.

On the one hand, Hanna Barbera would legitimately make for a fun, interesting universe with lots of different characters to add to it. I once had an idea for a huge HB crossover DCAU-style series because of it.

On the other hand, everything about S.C.O.O.B. looks horrible, ajd the wrong way to approach this.

edited 25th Aug '16 8:09:19 AM by KnownUnknown

HB has done crossover projects all the way back to the 80's at least with Laff-a-lympics and the various Yogi Bear projects that also featured Huckleberry Hound, Quickdraw Mc Graw, and several others. So the idea of a shared HB universe isn't (or shouldn't be) even remotely new territory for them.

Sort of. There've been crossover shows and cameo appearances, but they haven't really approached the idea of having all of their characters literally being in the same universe as a premise, at least not in a serious or developed way. Most of their actual crossovers, including Laff-A-Lympics, are one-offs.

The closest I can think of for shows that explicitly connect to one another is Wacky Races -> Penelope Pitstop, but even those have continuity issues (especially if you try to add Dastardly and his Flying Machines into the mix). There's also the Scooby Doo series, which has been like Batman The Brave And The Bold in terms of being the franchise where Hanna Barbera characters meet, but at the same time there's a lot of Negative Continuity there.

edited 25th Aug '16 10:06:27 PM by KnownUnknown

Yeah, I remember an episode of the recent Mystery Inc that had the Scooby gang to to a convention of all the other HB Scooby gang clones (like Speed Buggy, just to name one) but it turned out to be a dream.

Yeah, I remember that episode. It was fun to see the other Meddling Kid groups getting some love. (I do kind of hope that the reveal about The Funky Phantom is non-canon, though. I didn't really like that about the episode.)

Kinda makes me wonder as I think about the possible HB Cinematic Universe: Which of the other Meddling Kid groups seems like it has the best movie material?

If you ask me, I feel like you could get a good narrative out of Jabberjaw or Speed Buggy.

There were also The New Scooby-Doo Movies which were hour-long blocks of the Mystery Inc. team meeting up with a guest star(s). Off the top of my head, these guests were Don Adams, Phyllis Diller, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Reed, Batman & Robin, and Josie and the Pussycats.

My worry is that current WB management is losing their grip on the Franchise.Looney Tunes. Not until the series Wabbit aired did Bugs Bunny and company come close to their glorious The '40s selves. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tunes get sold to Disney, which has a knack for assimilating rival properties. Let's see the rabbit get out of that one.

I don't see WB selling the Looney Tunes franchise to Disney. There are lots of cartoon properties that have been more or less dormant for years (much more so than Looney Tunes) and you don't see the copyright holders of those attempting to sell out, or of Disney attempting to buy 'em. I doubt Disney is interested in any cartoon properties they don't already own, or develop themselves.

WB has been much more active at acquiring cartoon properties, given that they own their own Looney Tunes Library, as well as the cartoons of MGM, Paramount, Hanna-Barbera, and probably some I'm forgetting.

edited 27th Aug '16 3:53:50 PM by Robbery

There's also such a thing as anti-trust laws...

What's your guy's stances on Robert McKimson as a Looney Tunes director? Me, I'm on a love him or hate him kind of stance. For instance, I love his sense of comedic timing, like in his shorts Hillbilly Hare , Slap-Hoppy Mouse, Rabbit's Kin (ugh), and the Hippity-Hopper and Sylvester short that had them alongside a beleaguered, red-bearded lighthouse caretaker and his constantly nosy parrot are among some of my favorite of his shorts, but as his career went on, I noticed some trends. Increasingly limited animation (to the point of forgetting to put BACKGROUNDS in some of the works and moving mouths in sync with dialogue, anyone who's been watching on Creator/Boomerang knows what I've been talking about), increasingly stock plots, bits, and routines, more emphasis on punny instead of clever titles, and increasing issues with the audio recording.

It's hard to know if the declining quality had to do with the director, or with the diminishing budgets they were given. Budgets aside, a lot of the WB directors tried to adopt a more UPA style in the 50's and 60's. I know Mc Kimson directed a number of Pink Panther shorts in the 60's and 70's, too, and those are pretty good.

I for one can't stand any Roadrunner cartoon not directed by Chuck Jones, nor do I care for the Speedy Gonzales/ Sylvester or Speedy Gonzales/ Daffy cartoons that so clutter up the output of the Mirisch-Depatie-Freleng era. Actually, I don't care for most of Mirisch-Depatie-Freleng's WB output, which is funny since I really like a lot of the non-WB stuff they did.

Nobody likes the Speedy/Daffy cartoons, though.

I thought everybody liked the Pink Panther/Inspector/Ant and the Aardvark cartoons and Dr. Seuss specials DFE did, though.

edited 4th Sep '16 12:09:28 PM by Aldo930

I loved the 'Karmic Trickster' Pink Panther, but the character took a nosedive when they made him a hapless Butt-Monkey underdog.

The Ant and the Aardvark were always just mediocre. They didn't do anything that hadn't been done many times before in better predator-prey cartoons.

The Inspector was okay, but a more direct adaptation of Clouseau's character in the movies, rather than someone simply inspired by him, would have been better.

I can't remember any predator-prey cartoon where the leads sounded like Jackie Mason and Dean Martin.

I can't say that there are any Pink Panther cartoons that I think are bad, but I do think that the best of them are the more surreal one. Some of them are naked rip-offs of old Looney Tunes (there's one, for instance, where the Panther tries to hide as a stuffed trophy in a big game hunter's house which, while it sounds like a perfect plot for him, was a rip-off of at least two old Looney Tunes) and there were others that, while perhaps not rip-offs. did feel like the kind of thing that might better have starred Daffy or Sylvester.

I really liked the Inspector cartoons. The Ant and the Aardvark are hit and miss for me, and the one with the two Mexican toads just leave me cold.