Looney Tunes fans i've reviewed alot of stuff to do with the Looney Tunes characters from TV shows to movies but the one thing that i've never done is review the original Looney Tunes shorts and so in order to bring you this very review i've watched thirty of the original shorts back to back and i've done it all within the space of a few hours so here is my review of Looney Tunes.
Now since these shorts were made for cinema's and are only less then ten minuets long and they of course have no plot I won't be able to talk about things like the story because the set up changes every cartoon but I can say that some of the set ups do allow for a lot of jokes and what I noticed while watching the Road Runners cartoons is that those cartoons are like the Tom & Jerry shorts in that you only get a few minuets devoted to the set up and the rest is pure slapstick and it's not just in the Road Runner cartoons either it's in alot of the cartoons.
Since there are alot of cartoons and there's alot of actors i'm only going to mention actors who I know for a fact were in the cartoons I saw so we have Mel Blanc , June Foray and Arthur Q. Bryan. What more is there to say about these guys there legends and they created the voices for the characters that we all love so I can't really say anything about there performances because of course there all great and without those voice the characters we all know and love might be totally different.
Now I mentioned that I watched thirty of the original just to give you all an idea of how many episodes i'd usually watch for something that's eleven minuets long i'd normally watch around eleven episodes or so so compare that to the thirty i've just watched it's nearly triple the amount of episodes i'd watch and you know what I honestly didn't mind it because of how much I love Looney Tunes so for once this really didn't feel like that much of a chore for me.
I don't really think that it needs saying that Warner Bros. did the animation for all of these shorts but I do think it will be unfair of pretty much anyone to compare the animation in these shorts to that of a TV series since these shorts had the budget of a film and with that in mind I can say that the animation was really good there's a lot of inventive angles that would have been hard to do even with today's technology so imagine how hard it was in 50's and 60's and not only did they pull them of but they also look really good.
Here is something that I found out while watching whenever there's a Friz Freleng cartoon the backgrounds / layouts would always be done by Hawley Pratt who would go on to direct The Lorax special so really if you knew the names to look out for you could guess the name of the director before that credit even showed up.
Speaking of the directors the Looney Tunes these shorts had some of the best directors in animation history working on them with the likes of Chuck Jones , Tex Avery , Robert Mckimpson and Friz Freleng all directing Looney Tunes shorts so just by those names alone which I know won't mean a thing to modern animation fans but those are names to be respected for what they did in the field of animation.
While the Road Runner cartoons were like Tom & Jerry cartoons and they do have some really funny moments they were never my favorite cartoons to watch both growing up as a kid and now as an adult to me they were just long and boring and i'll admit while I know longer think there long and boring it's now because I found both characters to be boring there was just nothing interesting to me about them I have respect for those characters for making us laugh without any dialog but that doesn't mean I have to love them.
Here's one thing that you might not have realized but at least one of the cartoons has a dark ending the cartoon Ballot Box Bunny is really freaking dark it ends with Bugs and Sam playing Russian Roulette but it ends when bugs pulls the trigger and a gun shot sound is heard. Granted they do then reveal that Bugs missed himself and he shot Sam but even so that's a dark joke to end a cartoon on if that cartoon was made today that joke wouldn't even be in the script.
This was honestly one of the hardest things to do because there's so many cartoons to choose from and so many characters and I wanted to have a wide range so my review could be as good as it could be so i'll admit straight up that alot of the cartoons I picked were some of my personal favorites but alot of the cartoons i've honestly not seen before so that was really interesting for me because it was like I was a kid again watching these shorts for the first time.
For me some of the best cartoons are the ones that will always make me laugh no matter how many times i've seen them and my all time personal favorite cartoon is "Duck Amuck" because of that very fact and it helps that that short has a unique set up that until that point hadn't been done before and the cartoon was so successful that they tried the same concept again years later with Bugs Bunny to less successful results and what you might not know is Duck Amuck was voted the second best cartoon of all time loosing out to "What's Opera Doc?".
These characters are so iconic that you all you have to do is just have a t-shirt with Bugs's ears on it and people will know instantly who it is and while I do know these characters as pop culture icons I have to wonder when did the team at Warner bros realize that these characters were going to be hge because there was a while in the 60's where the characters were everywhere on TV so one has to wonder if that's when they started to realize it or if it was later on.
These characters are so popular that they appeared in many TV shows with perhaps the most famous being The Bugs Bunny Show which ran for around forty years but under many different names and the most recent show being the dreadful Wabbit / New Looney Tunes but tho for me it goes to show that these characters have lasting appeal now because there appealing to young kids and the grown ups who grew up watching the original shorts can now sit down and enjoy them with any kids they might have.
Getting back to these shorts I found the backgrounds to be really great looking of course that goes back to what I said about the animation but it's still something that I feel needs to be said because when people talk about Looney Tunes they never mention the backgrounds they always mention the animation , the acting and the humor and not always in that order and while all of those are worth talking about it we should also take some time to mention the backgrounds.
Not only is there a tone of Looney Tunes TV shows there's also a lot of movies with the first five just being compilation films so you really have no excuse not to watch some Looney Tunes because there's plenty of ways to watch them but the fact they got that many films just from the shorts alone is beyond me these days producers wouldn't even make one film which is basically a clip show and yet Warners made five of them granted alot of them are bad but still it's something to be admired.
It wouldn't be a review of Looney Tunes if I didn't mention the humor yeah there still really freaking funny and what helps make these characters timeless for me is the fact that you get the jokes on two levels one as a kid and the second as an adult and that to me is truly astounding so basically you can watch them as a kid and laugh at a joke but when you see them as an adult you'll get the joke plus something you didn't notice as a kid.
What for me helps set Looney Tunes apart from something like Mickey Mouse and Tom & Jerry is the fact that alot of the Looney Tunes jokes aren't done via slapstick it's done from wordplay and when you think about it there's not that much slapstick in Looney Tunes but there is some great wordplay granted alot of it is from the master of wordplay Bugs Bunny but it's always funny and it makes the slapstick seem even funnier because of the fact that you've been laughing at just the set up to the punchline.
Overall there's nothing really new I could add to the franchise and there's no point in me giving you a rating because you'll know by now if you like this franchise or not but if you havn't done yet I urge you to check out these shorts anyway you can because they are still the best cartoons out there.