Elmer Fudd’s quest to foil that “scwewy wabbit” will be done without guns.
In a new series based on the iconic “Looney Tunes” cartoon, Fudd will no longer chase down Bugs Bunny with his rifle, The Hill reported.
“Looney Tunes Cartoons,” which premiered on the streaming service HBO Max last week, will still contain the violence that has marked the brand since it debuted for Warner Bros. in 1930, New York Times reported. The original show featured booby traps, sticks of dynamite, anvils and even bank safes as weapons. Fudd will be chasing Bugs Bunny with a scythe, among other weapons.
Peter Browngardt, the series’ executive producer, told the Times,“We’re not doing guns.”
“But we can do cartoony violence -- TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in," Browngardt told the newspaper.
The shorts range in duration from one to six minutes.
The Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny characters were introduced into the “Looney Tunes” lineup in 1940.
“I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros. had never stopped making “Looney Tunes” cartoons?’” Browngardt told the Times. “As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
The “Looney Tunes" cartoons were originally created to play in theaters before feature films. They moved to television in 1960. Through the years, the cartoons of “Looney Tunes” and its sister animated series, “Merrie Melodies," have been nominated for 22 Academy Awards and have won five Oscars, the Times reported.
Reconfiguring the series to the 21st century is not easy, but the show’s creators and animators said they were ready for the challenge.
“It’s hard, any time you have to work on your favorite thing,” Alex Kirwan, a writer and supervising producer, told the Times. “It’s like someone saying, ‘All right everybody, we’re writing new Beatles songs! Everyone get to work writing Beatles songs.'"
Los Angeles-based indie comics artist Johnny Ryan. brought in as the series’ story editor, said the cartoons are both timeless and not of this time.
“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” Ryan told the Times. "Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”