When was looney toons created

He would star in 39 more cartoons. The first Warner Bros. With Owls. Cartman broke into the title tune whenever he was zapped by an alien ray in the very first episode of South Park. This collection of spot gags captures an old-fashioned night at the movies complete with newsreel, sing-along, and the main attraction, a spoof of The Petrified Forest.

Daffy Duck makes a big splash in his debut. Dramatic angles and odd perspectives keep this one chugging along.

Drugstore magazines come to life after-hours with literal characterizations of their titles. Thus, a miscreant is sentenced to Life but escapes through Liberty with other magazine figures in hot pursuit. Warner Bros. Daffy runs amuck on a movie-studio set, but is sure to give his studio a plug. Spot gags pay off in this spoof of Warner Bros. Something new has been added: rotoscoping to bring to life personages and events from American history to inspire Porky to learn the Pledge of Allegiance.

Elmer Fudd stars in a rare heroic role as John Alden in this retelling of the courtship between Priscilla and Miles Standish. Brace yourself for the inevitable Cleveland Indians sight gag. Daffy goes Eve Harrington on Porky, convincing him to quit cartoons for feature films, thus paving his way to A-list status.

An impressive early blend of live action and animation that features a cameo by cartoon producer Leon Schlesinger. Rather than satirize Disney cartoons, Jones emulated them with this mostly played-straight telling of the Grimm brothers fairy tale that includes a dramatic snowstorm rescue and tear-jerking reconciliation. Sniffles, maybe the most Disney-esque character in the Warner Bros. Porky is hosting the premiere of his new cartoon that he made himself.

Once again, the celebrity caricatures are beside the point. These cartoons continued to be used for television broadcasts over the decades, and some ended up on low-budget bargain-bin home video labels after the original cartoons fell into the public domain , although the colorized versions should be considered under copyright. Between , Warner Bros.

The digital technology allowed for the quality of the original animation to be preserved; thus, these colorized versions could be seen as superior to the versions. Networks today like Boomerang USA still continue to show the hand-colorized and computer-colorized versions.

In the s, WB sold the TV distribution rights to their films and sold some of their copyrights to a. Warner Bros. In , Warner Bros. The copyrights to the cartoons in the package were assigned to Sunset Productions , an entity owned by Warner Bros.

The cartoons were distributed by Guild Films until When Guild shut down in , Motion Pictures retained the TV rights for a brief amount of time before closing when merging with Seven Arts. Although Warner Bros. By the time they were given back to WB in , three of them were already in the public domain.

These were inferior to what was being shown at the movie theaters and overtime these 8mm and 16mm prints were even duplicated into much more inferior prints causing many currently unavailable on DVD cartoons to have various qualities around the Internet. WB retained their original negatives at the studios, however, they failed to send new batches of prints every ten years, unlike the post cartoons and the Guild package, which had new transfers made every ten years to make them appear marketable.

The old prints were then junked. United Aritsts bought their assets and paid their way out of bankruptcy and merged the company into its television division—United Artists Television. United Aritsts even removed the Censored Eleven from USA television packages in due to severe stereotyping of black people. They continued however, to show the rest of the pre output.

Pretty soon they started to release pre cartoons on their first home video set called the Viddy-Oh! For Kids Cartoon Festivals. These prints were also to what was being shown on television because WB never send MGM new prints of the cartoons.

In addition to the inferiority, the prints even had altered opening titles, using the Inki and the Lion Blue Ribbon titles. These new home video releases had the correct opening titles, unlike the previous.

Turner's company, Turner Broadcasting System, whose Turner Entertainment division oversaw the film library, merged with Time Warner in , thus the classic library was once again under ownership of WB,although technically they are owned by Turner, with WB handling sales and distribution,. When the Looney Tunes were shown on TV, WB prepared 16mm "dupes" in Eastmancolor of the original prints for the syndication market; these prints faded over time, causing them to look "inferior" to what was being shown at the movies.

WB failed to send new prints to AAP and its successors over the years and meanwhile, the post cartoons new prints were created periodically to continue appearing fresh, including their dubbed versions. As a result, when the cartoons entered local syndication, there would be considerable difference in quality of the WB-owned and a.

The former package had new prints prepared for the cable networks that aired them, whereas the latter package, when shown on the Turner networks, looked inferior, faded, and dull, even after two separate remasters in and When Time Warner and Turner Entertainment had merged in , the a. These were master dubbed copies, unlike the TV copies used. The other two-thirds are still unrestored, with WB having low sales of recent sets and no more budget left to restore these leftover shorts.

From the faded quality, this was most likely recorded on a VHS. With his red hair and hair-trigger temper, he inspired Mel Blanc and the animators in creating Yosemite Sam.

He apparently took the ribbing well, since he directed dozens of cartoons with the little cowboy throughout his career. Freleng even said Sam was one of his favorites, since he always felt pitting Bugs against little Elmer Fudd made him look like a bully and Sam gave the wabbit a real threat to match wits with.

Freleng was also responsible for pitting Clampett's Tweety Bird against his own creation, Sylvester, and he'd later create Speedy Gonzales as another sparring partner for the bad ole putty tat.

McKimson, part of an animation dynasty with his brothers Charles and Tom, kept his mentor's style alive, literally warping the characters around his imprint — they all have much bigger mouths and jowls in McKimson cartoons than anybody else's.

Fans tend to call him the least of the classic directors , but the least of such a talented bunch has more creativity than the best of most studios. If you want to understand the energy of McKimson's cartoons, you just have to look at his two most popular creations — the loudmouthed rooster Foghorn Leghorn, and the Tasmanian Devil, a literal tornado of destruction.

Other directors frequently only animated the most important parts of their characters, redrawing the eyes and mouths while recycling the same body, but McKimson's characters never stop moving. And McKimson's responsible for some of Looney Tunes ' most hilarious entries, like Rabbit's Kin where Bugs outsmarts a puma with an unforgettable wheezy laugh provided by comedian Stan Freberg, or Hillbilly Hare where, in one of the series' greatest extended gags, Bugs leads two hunters on a bone-crunching square dance across the countryside for half the short.

As the '50s ran on, TV started cutting more and more into the theatrical cartoons' market share. Termite Terrace had already survived one scare at the height of the 3D movie fad in , when studio head Jack Warner shuttered the studio for six months because he was convinced soon every movie would be in 3D and it would be too expensive to animate cartoons in the new process. When Chuck Jones joked that Warner predicted every child would be born with one green and one red eye, it's not much more ridiculous than the reality.

But as the '50s turned into the '60s, the budgets and profit margins kept shrinking. The animation studio finally shut down in But by the time the backlog of completed cartoons was used up, Warners decided they wanted to keep making Looney Tunes after all. By then, most of the old staff had gone on to greener pastures. Seuss on the holiday classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas! But the results disappointed audiences, and the revival only lasted a few years.

The studio then returned to making its cartoons with an in-house animation studio, but that effort also petered out quickly.

By the end of the '60s, it was over. But as Elmer Fudd found out the hard way, ducks and wabbits are mighty hard to kill. Ironically, TV kept the cartoons alive after demolishing their theatrical profits, with reruns introducing them to generations of kids. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And it finally showed audiences what every cartoon-loving kid had always imagined: Mickey Mouse chilling out with Bugs Bunny and a fight between Daffy and Donald Duck.

The success of Roger Rabbit led its producer, Steven Spielberg , to pick up Tiny Toon Adventures , a TV series in which the classic stars mentored a new generation of cartoon critters. And a series of Nike commercials used Roger Rabbit 's revolutionary techniques to film a basketball game between Bugs and Michael Jordan.

Warners expanded them to feature length in Space Jam , introducing a whole new generation to Bugs and his friends.

Warners hired director Joe Dante to oversee it. He certainly had the pedigree: He was Chuck Jones' close friend, inviting him to cameo in Gremlins and create new animation for its sequel. He'd even spent years trying to make a movie about Termite Terrace. Unfortunately, Back in Action 's box-office failure seemed to be the end of big screen Looney Tunes While the thumbnail image of Bugs chatting on a cellphone suggests another modern update along the lines of Space Jam, the cartoons themselves are anything but: They painstakingly recreate the hand-painted look of the original shorts, and the new character designs call back to the characters' earliest appearances with touches like Sylvester's yellow eyes and snaggletooth.

But HBO Max, the new streaming service, has come to the rescue. The service features a huge collection of the original Looney Tunes cartoons though not all of them , as well as a brand new series of Looney Tunes animated shorts drawn in a modern style, closer to what you might find on Cartoon Network.

And the new versions are pretty good! The two of us recently hopped on Zoom to chat all things looney, tuney, and marooney. Emily: I grew up with Looney Tunes. Revisiting these cartoons as an adult reveals just how much their sense of humor leached out into the world at large. Gags pile on top of gags pile on top of gags, and the incredibly simple stories nonetheless possess real depth. Eliza: Yes. Remember how the big dog thought she got cooked, because she was in the batter?

His mother, she was a human, but she thought [the kitty] was a toy. Emily: Your mom said this is your first experience with these sorts of animated shorts. How do you feel about cartoons? Eliza: I liked them. A brief lesson in what an aspect ratio is: The first number is the width of an image and the second the height, so a 1. Emily: This is, as you might expect, huge news. But you heard it here first, folks: Bugs Bunny is a girl, and my esteemed colleague Eliza figured it out.

I will endeavor to only use female pronouns for her throughout the rest of this piece, in keeping with this groundbreaking news. Emily: One thing the new series lacks is the fluid quality of hand-drawn animation. The original cartoons boast an endless series of entertaining visuals and gorgeously drawn characters whose micro-expressions and tiny movements are beautifully rendered by some of the best animation directors in history, including Chuck Jones , Fritz Freleng , and a host of others.

And then, the coup de grace: The camera pulls back to reveal Bugs Bunny herself is the gal behind the eraser. And, indeed, she is a stinker. It is one of the most significant short films ever made, and even if it were the only thing Jones had ever directed, it would cement him as a great.

Eliza, you love to draw. Did you know animation is just a bunch of drawings put together like a flipbook? Eliza: stony silence, then: I could probably make a cartoon.