It’s in the rules somewhere.
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Fudd is no longer the bully with the firepower who Bugs must use his wits to survive and turn the tables on. Bugs is now just a heavily-armed bomber who responds to threats with a stream of attacks. Fudd is now reduced to a hapless half-wit who, for some reason, keeps running into danger despite facing a clearly better armed opponent.
Spot-on analysis.
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As long as they don’t do a Lucas-style CGI “improvement” to this end on the classic WB cartoons, I really don’t care.* Childhood remains unruined, and the originals remain available for the viewing pleasure of generations to come.
[* if I recall correctly, there has been editing out from the originals over the years, but more in service of more Saturday morning ad space than concern over violence]
That’s where the missed opportunity is here. Fudd would be a great character to use to parody a typical modern American ammosexual. You could have one cartoon where he’s part of a militia, one where he’s a member of the NRA, one where he’s an obsessive collector, one where he aims a weapon at his crotch with the safety off.
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I watched a new Looney Tune short just recently and was disappointed in the lazy limited animation, which looks bad relative to something made during the Jones/Freleng/Clampett era. It’s more on par with Spongebob.
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I’ve seen the first few shorts (including the Bugs / Elmer one, wondering where Elmer’s gun was) and they were uninspired at best, frankly. They’re overly faithful to the style and feel of the Bob Clampett Looney Tunes for some reason (they were made 90 years ago!) without really understanding any of what made those cartoons actually funny and relevant.
Getting rid of Elmer’s shotgun underscores that for me. I mean, Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam are not only foils, they’re buffoons. They don’t make gun ownership look cool, if anything they parody it. But hey – why actually be creative, like Disney did with their excellent new series of Mickey shorts – when you can ring another mortgage out of another cherished license with pointless virtue signaling?
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Nah, there’s been violence cut out over the years.
The Looney Tunes series’ popularity was strengthened even more when the shorts began airing on network and syndicated televisionin the 1950s, under various titles and formats. However, the Looney Tunes shorts were edited, removing scenes of violence (particularly suicidal gags and scenes of characters doing dangerous stunts that impressionable viewers could easily imitate), racial and ethnic caricatures (including stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans, Mexicans, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, and Germans as Nazis), and questionable vices (such as smoking cigarettes, ingesting pills, and drinking alcohol).
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Well, I instantly think of actual Looney Tunes cartoons like “Fresh Hare” where Bugs got the best of mounted policeman Elmer Fudd or “Southern Fried Rabbit” where Bugs outwits a Yosemite Sam who thinks the Civil War never ended.
(Both cartoons feature blackface, ironically, so obviously some updates were needed, but baby and bathwater, you know?)
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I definitely knew that the racist stuff was edited out, and that some of the racist cartoons were pulled entirely, but wasn’t aware about the removal of the violent scenes.
I remember seeing the following cartoon at a WB revival festival in a theatre as a teenager. The whole audience was laughing in horror, scandalised that such a thing ever existed under the WB banner.
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This is the same kind of thought that leads people to ban squirt guns. I get the base argument, but summer just ain’t as much fun without them ^^’.
The League Against Cartoon Violence are going to go mental when they catch up with “Harley Quinn”. And then there’s the swearing, the gags about Bats loving bats…
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I was going to mention that anyone who enjoys a violent cartoon that’s actually humorous and well written should check out the new Harley Quinn series. It had my attention from the first scene of the first episode.
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I recollect seeing some of the edited cartoons some years back where they were clearly altered over concerns of violence. They cut out the bit where the attacks actually land - we see the gun get pointed (and perhaps even hear it go off) but don’t see it, the bomb never explodes (on screen), etc. They were… not successful.
(And apparently there were even more cuts that I’m remembering:)
And a bunch of cartoons were simply taken out of circulation entirely, before I saw any, as they were too grotesque for modern sensibilities (though this was mostly due to their blatant racism).
I only care insomuch as these new cartoons are bad, but since I wasn’t going to watch them anyways, it’s more disappointment that they’ve missed out on the point of the original cartoons and their audience will miss out on that as well. That is: that Bugs is an innocent minding his own business who faces a variety of heavily armed maniacs trying to murder him and, armed only with his puckish wit and a variety of women’s outfits, he’s able to not just survive but triumph. Now Bugs has been reduced to a heavily armed maniac himself.
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I’m hoping the Q-35 Matter Modulator falls under “Acme stuff” even though it’s Martian in origin.
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Elmer and Sam’s guns established them as threats, and their foils consistently used that against them to show the folly of firearms. Removing that instead of leveraging it for good feels like the victim of executive decision-making.
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I am entirely for getting rid of the gun simply because it gave us this twitter thread.
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Hey—you say “nitroglycerin,” I say “C4 explosive.” Po-tay-to, poh-tah-to.
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Scrolled thru all the comments looking for a mention of this, but:
https://medium.com/@nriley/words-matter-why-we-should-put-an-end-to-grandfathering-8b19efe08b6a
OK, i believe What’s Opera Doc gets far more attention than it deserves while The Rabbit of Seville is criminally overlooked. To wit:
WOD has all of three gags “Kill da Wabbit” and Bugs in drag.
TRoS is a cornucopia of costumes and sight gags all backed up by the many sections of the classical music piece:
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