For close to years, Looney Tunes has been so much a part of American pop culture that it's hard to imagine a world without it. We couldn't zip around like Speedy Gonzales, and annoying little critters wouldn't be "varmints. Anvils would only be for shoeing horses. And while a generation of kids might have still grown up worshipping Michael "Air" Jordan , we would have lost the chance to see him spar with Bugs Bunny as Hare Jordan in Space Jam. That's a lot of history, and as we celebrate these cartoon stars' longevity with the new series on HBO Max or look forward to their return to the big screen in Space Jam: A New Legacy with LeBron James , it's worth taking a moment to look back at how we got here. These classics didn't just come out of thin air, after all. They were the work of a collection of personalities every bit as colorful as their animated menagerie of ducks and wabbits.
"Leopold!"
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Things you buy through our links may earn New York a commission. On April 17, , the very first Warner Bros. While Walt Disney was focused on elevating the art of animation, Warner Bros.
In the beginnning
Looney Tunes is an American animated comedy short film series produced by Warner Bros. After Bugs Bunny became the breakout recurring star of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes moved from black and white to color production in the early s Merrie Melodies having already been in color since [4] , the two series gradually lost their distinctions, and shorts were assigned to each series randomly. Looney Tunes has since become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television series, feature films, comic books, music albums, video games, and amusement park rides, as well as serving as Warner Bros. Many of the characters have made and continue to make cameo appearances in numerous other television shows, films, and advertisements. Rabbit, Duck! In the beginning, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were built around songs from Warner's vast music library, starting with Sinkin' in the Bathtub , a pun on the song Singin' in the Bathtub in Warner made a deal with Leon Schlesinger to produce cartoons for them. Schlesinger hired Rudolf Ising and Hugh Harman to produce the first series of cartoons. When Harman and Ising left Warner Bros. A new character called Buddy became the only star of the Looney Tunes series for a couple of years.
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies are two series of theatrical cartoon shorts which initially ran from to Warner Bros. Originally, as the names indicate , these cartoons were meant to riff off the sweet, sentimental musical shorts then in vogue: for instance, Disney's Silly Symphonies. That basing cartoons around popular public-domain songs — or, even better, ones the studio already owned — was a fast and relatively cheap way of producing them didn't hurt any, either.
