Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/04/new-network-for-classic-cartoons-is-coming-metv-toons.html
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This is cool. What’s not cool is the lack of MeTV on streaming.
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It’s available on Frndly and Philo but they’re paid services.
It’s also available in most markets over air.
When we take long weekends in the RV, unless we’re way out in the boonies, we can usually find MeTv.
That’s not streaming but a small antenna with a booster might pick it up if you’re too far from the signal.
This is a great site for seeing what’s over air and what kind of antenna you need.
All that being said I wish MeTv had their own app.
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The unasked question is if these toons will be the originals or will they be the sanitized version, especially the Roadrunner toons, which were heavily edited because of the frequent cartoon “violence”? 
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How embarrassing. I can’t imagine being able to enjoy cartoons like that. I vaguely remember seeing that starting to happen to some of 'em that were shown on cartoon network.
Do they show the really cool, genuine old school black and white stuff that is pertinent to my interests?
All of the classic Loony Toons directors were great, but Chuck Jones was an absolute genius! He had so many absolute classic cartoons, from Bugs and Daffy to Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, to one-offs like The Grinch, The Line and the Dot, and One Froggy Evening. His characters’ expressions and gestures were perfect comedy. His later offerings were not as good as I always hoped they would be, but when he was at his prime there were no better.
Not a Chuck Jones toon, but It’s appropriate here:
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Can you be specific about which episodes you’re talking about that were censored? I’m aware of outright racist shit being pulled, but not sure about issues of the roadrunner being pulled due to “violence”? But please let us know what you are talking about…
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I remember Turner re-dubbed the voices of Black women in Tom & Jerry, but don’t recall any seemingly truncated Road Runner cartoons.
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The last time they aired on TV was on Cartoon Network, and they were uncensored. Sounds like it was recognized that they went too far in the 80’s and there’s no reason to censor them again.
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A quick search shows a number of references to Roadrunner and other toons being edited due to perceived violence and other “indiscretions“. Here is a good example from a wiki:
“In the 1980s and 1990s, ABC began showing many Warner Bros. cartoon shorts, but in highly edited form, because the unedited versions were supposedly too violent. Many scenes integral to the stories were taken out, including scenes in which Wile E. Coyote lands at the bottom of the canyon after having fallen from a cliff, or has a boulder or anvil actually make contact with him. In almost all W.B. animated features, scenes where a character’s face is burnt and black, resembling blackface, were removed, as were animated characters smoking cigarettes, or even simulated cigarettes. Some cigar-smoking scenes were left in. The unedited versions of these shorts (with the exception of ones with blackface and other racial stereotypes) were not aired again until Cartoon Network, and later Boomerang, began showing them again in the late-1990s, early-2000s, 2009, 2010, and from 2011-2016. Since the release of the W.B. archive of cartoons on DVD, Boomerang has stopped showing the cartoons in 2007, presumably to increase sales of the DVDs. Boomerang, however, began re-airing the shorts since 2013.”
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Thanks!
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Don’t sleep on the Fleischer Bros! Back in the day they were neck and neck with Disney as far as technical innovation, but way, way cooler!
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That was an especially frequent “gag” in a lot of Tom & Jerry cartoons I saw when I was a kid in the early 80s (i.e., Tom blowing cigar smoke into Jerry’s face to turn him into a minstrel caricature and making him dance to entertain Tom’s girlfriend), though I didn’t have the historical context to understand it at the time. Pretty crazy how long shit like that was still being broadcast on TV.
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There was a period in college when I was reading a lot of Samuel Beckett works and then, one Saturday morning, went down to the TV room. Within a few minutes I was struck by the idea that Beckett’s “Act Without Words” was basically a Coyote & Roadrunner cartoon.
My first thought was that Chuck Jones was influenced by absurdist theater. Then I found that “The Fast and Furry-ous” predated Beckett’s play by eight years, which made me think that Nobel Prize for literature should have been given to both of them. 
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There’s certain racist content that I wouldn’t be upset to see edited, but what really drives me nuts when watching Looney Tunes cartoons is the amount of the story that gets cut for time. For whatever reason this seems to be almost ubiquitous for modern showings of Looney Tunes, with important parts of the story that add to pacing and character motivations trimmed out to just quickly get to the classic zany gags as quickly as possible. The other day I was trying to show my family the full unedited Bugs Bunny classic Long Haired Hare, but most of the versions that I was able to find online cut out quite a bit, including the parts showing that Giovanni Jones antagonized Bugs several different times before Bugs finally decided to get his revenge. That background made the comeuppance all the sweeter.
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Those cartoons were expertly, perfectly paced for 7 minutes and 30 seconds. To cut anything is sacrilege!
I mean really!!! These were masters working at the top of their form! It’s like chopping up the Mona Lisa to fit in a smaller frame!
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Wife and I put MeTV cartoons on every Saturday. We love the nostalgia, and it’s great to enjoy unmonitored over-the-air TV.
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It’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In the summer, I like to watch 3 Stooges projected onto my house in the back yard. Good times!
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