The official news of the latest Looney Tunes franchise is now with us.
Cartoon Network is launching a new version of the classic Warner Bros. series "Looney Toons." The announcement was part of the network's upfront presentation, which included a slew of new series and an animated version of "Mad" magazine (full list and art below).
"The Looney Toons Show" will star Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, along with Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Sylvester -- the whole gang. Weirdly, the network is having each episode as a half-hour story along with "cartoons within a cartoon." ...
There have been lots of sequels and spin-offs to the original Looney Tunes over the years. In theaters there was Space Jam and Back in Action. Two decades ago, Steven Spielberg and Warners partnered for Tiny Toon Adventures on television. More recently there was the Loonatics Unleashed.
The new LTs have had ... what's the right phrase here? ... a challenging development history. There have been production course corrections. Board artists have been laid off and new ones brought on. Directors and production people have been replaced.
Still in all, artists tell me that the character designs they're working with are top-notch. And I have hopes that the show will turn out to be worth watching. (I'm always hopeful. Also trusting. Every union rep is, so why should I be different?)
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I want to be optimistic when the artists describe the character designs as "top notch," and I hope that they mean "faithful to the designs used in dozens of hilarious and successful shorts."
However, the more cynical and experienced side of me is guessing that they mean the characters are somehow different and "updated" from their classic incarnations. Considering that the art of funny character design has mostly regressed since the 1940s, this worries me quite a lot.
Wow. Those re-designs are, well, pretty crappy. I can only hope that the image on the Hollywood Reporter page is just a piece of publicity art. Daffy looks anorexic and brittle, Bugs looks wrong, his proportions are unappealing and the new stylized feet don't gel with the un-stylized hands that look small next to his huge and uglified head. Why change them? If it were up to me I'd pick vintage Jones Bugs and Daffy model sheets. They haven't dated and my kids LOVE watching them.
who gives a crap what they look like. more importantly, you just cannot create anything new for these icons. they are icons, not characters. they are dead. dead. dead. dead. dead!
In related news, Columbia records will release a new Beatles album. It won't be made by the Beatles, but the musicians will try really hard to sound like them.
For studios, it's now ALL about the brandname (and who's got it)--
Disney has Mickey and the Princesses, DW has Shrek, Sony's...still looking, and Warner has Superman, Batman, and the Looneys.
(And apparently just remembered that they still own Mad Magazine, too, leaving aside that mummy of a Fox series.)
It's not "How can we outdo Chuck Jones?", it's "How can we sell the franchise characters to (Insert one: Preschool = "Baby LT", Action teens = "Loonatics")
Put this in the same category as Warner's earlier attempt to sell Superman to a preschool audience.
I keep hearing this show is a "sitcom." Which means lots of talking.
Yippee.
Out of topic but, is there any truth to the rumor that Sony is developing a sequel to cloudy?
There might be, though I've heard nothing specific. (They're finishing up the second sequel to "Open Season," the production for which is being done in Texas at Reel Effx.
And again, the reason we're getting a third Open Season, when most people don't even know there was a second one, dates back to Sony's troubles, which is Warner's whole point:
Sony doesn't have Their Own Cartoon Character to sell on t-shirts, and they feel it's keeping them out of the new corporate-store race--They used to have UPA and Magoo, but that's now in other hands. Before "Season", the only hope they had for an in-house Toon Icon to sell was using their MGM/UA ownership to flog the Pink Panther, which's why we kept getting all those Steve Martin movies.
Warner knows that they can't keep selling Classic Looney and Justice League boxsets to the same people every single time--And their marketing has been getting pretty creative about experimenting with which demog audiences haven't gotten their first prescription dose of the corporate characters yet.
It's funny, the Pink Panther has been around for years, yet to date NOBODY has figured out what to do with him. He still has no personality and his character design has gone downhill.
He ought to be taken back to his roots - be the panther he was in the opening credits of the very first Pink Panther film. Then maybe he'd be interesting again.
The Pink Panther was a great use of a specific character to a specific work of music. There was no way or where to go with him.
Well I think so that Warner knows that they can't keep selling Classic Looney and Justice League boxsets to the same people every single time--
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