From yesterday’s Warner Bros Press Release:

DESCENDANTS OF WARNER BROS.’ LEGENDARY LOONEY TUNES- BUGS BUNNY, DAFFY DUCK, LOLA BUNNY, TASMANIAN DEVIL, ROAD RUNNER AND WILE E. COYOTE – ARE UNLEASHED AS FUTURISTIC HEROES IN BRAND NEW SERIES “LOONATICS”

Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, fast-forwarding seven-hundred years into the future, Loonatics will feature six descendants of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, Lola Bunny, Tasmanian Devil and Wile E. Coyote. Endowed with individual super-powers and unique abilities these new Looney characters band together to create a formidable team and face-off against the evils of Acmetropolis.

Back in the late 80s, I had the exact same reaction to Spielberg’s announcement that he was creating Tiny Toons: bile rising, eyes scrunching up into what could be seen as anger or illness, arms flopping to the side in resignation to a man with more money than God. But in the end, it spawned a couple great shows like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

Let’s face it. Bugs and Daffy hit their Acme with Chuck Jones/Mel Blanc dressing them in drag and letting them carelessly play with loaded shotguns meant for rabbit duck season. But look back at the evolution of Bugs and you will find that he went through some healthy character development for years after his creation, but that abruptly stopped since the 60s when WB stopped caring about their animation division. Maybe this show will be the mid-life growth spurt Bugs has been needing?

I hope Loonatics will have deep pop-culture moments like Yakko Animaniac’s curvy eyebrow flick while singing “Dana Delany!” in the opening credits of his show. Or create new characters like Scrappy Squirrel, (loved her ironic kvetching over how cartoons use to be).

But somehow I doubt it.

After sitting on their asses, raking in the profits from the syndication of the Tiny Toons, WB made a decent hack at feature length animation with Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (that dog’s breakfast of suits-overriding-creativity is a whole other blog entry), yet managed to pork Brad big-time on distribution rights, effectively scaring a master director away into the arms of Pixar. WB then tried too hard too late to parade their outmoded characters into the movies. Hairyfishnuts put it sussinctly when he said: “they’re playing with a corpse, turn him into Poochy for all I care.” (he talks of the whole Jeff/Jim thing but eventually mentions ‘toons). In my opinion, those movies were driven by people who just didn’t “get” the Bugs Bunny culture. Look at every cameo guest star’s face during Back In Action: they wear the expression of having been threatened with contract termination while they barf out those gwadawful lines.

With this new “updating” I am hoping that these characters will get a fresh feng shui-ing and coat of paint they been waiting for. Or they should just remake a whole new set of characters, but that would take years of development and I bet WB doesn’t want to spend that kind of money or resources to do that.

Sort of like how Microsoft creates Windows products.

Bazing!