Bugs Bunny is back, as is the chaos of Looney Tunes

In Dynamite Dance, Elmer Fudd arrives at Bugs Bunny with a scythe, prompting the hare to wedge a stick of lit dynamite in the mouth of elms.

During the short animated video, the explosives get bigger and more numerous, while Bugs blocks dynamite in Elmers’ ears, on his bald head and on his pants. The relentless assault passes from rowboat to unicycle to biplane, each timed explosion to the fiery melody of Ponchiellis Dance of the Hours.

The short film has the shameless look, feel, and chaos of a classic Looney Tunes cartoon from the early 1940s. But Dynamite Dance is from a much more recent vintage, one of many created by a new generation of Warner Bros. animators. in the past two years.

The resulting series, Looney Tunes Cartoons, is a return effort used to help fill a brilliant new platform. It was created this week as part of HBO Max, the new streaming service combining shows and movies from the Time Warner entertainment empire, which includes, among others, HBO, TNT, TBS, CNN and Warner Bros. (AT&T, which purchased Time Warner in 2018, controls the entire portfolio.)

After a meeting between Browngardt and Sam Register, the president of Warner Bros. Animation, the project really started. Browngardt quickly began to assemble a team of true believers, staunch fans who had watched the originals on syndicated television. He enlisted the host Jim Soper for character design (I’ve been waiting my whole life for this call, he told Browngardt) as well as for the screenwriter Ryan Khatam. A lifelong fan, Khatam had collected and cataloged QuickTime versions of all Looney Tunes short films since their debut in 1930, something the studio itself had neglected to do.

I was like, you hired, said Browngardt.

For the story editor, Browngardt recruited Los Angeles-based independent comic artist Johnny Ryan. Before his concert at Looney Tunes, Ryan was perhaps best known for his work on the independent comics Angry Youth Comix and Prison Pit, which feature frequent scenes of nudity, torture, body excretion and random violence. I thought it would be fun, said Ryan.

After the initial summit, the gravity of the project settled. It’s hard, every time you have to work on your favorite thing, said Alex Kirwan, writer and supervising producer. It’s like someone is saying: Okay, everyone is writing new Beatles songs! Everyone goes to work to write Beatles songs.

I would say there was a good month of just terror, he added.

To prepare, the team read classic texts on the show (Bugs Bunny: 50 years and one gray hare) and looked at the kind of acts inspired by vaudeville from which the original artists had drawn (Les Trois Stooges, Laurel and Hardy). Above all, they watched the original cartoons, over 1,000 in all.

I remember watching them as a child and being like, who Humphrey Bogart who wants Elmer Fudd to make him a sandwich ?, said Ryan. What is this strange and secret world? As a child, it is your window to history, great music, incredible comedy. All this goes through cartoons.

The original Termite deck has become legendary for its excessive workload, its abundance of pranks and its general lack of studio surveillance. The directors put a lot of emphasis on art (like Browngardt, a CalArts graduate, these first directors came from artistic circles and often from art schools) and music (hence Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies), and less on formal plots.

In a short cartoon, simplicity is key, said Andrew Farago, curator of Museum of cartoon art in San Francisco and co-author, with Ruth Clampett, of The Looney Tunes Treasury.

Elmer Fudd wants to go to sleep. Bugs Bunny needs a snack, he said. If you can explain the plot in three seconds, anyone in the world can identify with it.

And then there is the impeccable comic timing. For directors like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng and Tex Avery, it was an art and a science, continued Farago. They knew it was the number of seconds it would take after the coyote hit the ground before a puff of smoke rose.

For Looney Tunes Cartoons, Browngardt and company followed in the footsteps of the masters. In their writers’ room in Burbank, the artists launched ideas based on the simplest of places, which were documented on sticky notes and dry-erase boards.

We don’t do scripts, said Browngardt. I hired designers. So we bring them together in a room and we just draw pictures and gags. Fans of the originals will recognize classic characters (perennials like Daffy Duck and Bugs, of course, but also lesser-known characters like Gauze, a big orange beast created by Chuck Jones in 1946, and the odd mouse couple Hubie and Bertie) and gags (Bugs disguised as a woman; physics and falls defying gravity).

The old violence of Looney Tunes is there too: sticks of dynamite, complicated traps, anvils and safes on unsuspecting heads.

Did not make firearms, said Browngardt. But we can make cartoony TNT violence, the Acme thing. All of this was somehow protected by acquired rights.

The team is currently working remotely and finishes production on the first 1,000 minutes of the house’s cartoons. This represents about 200 caricatures in all; the first batch on HBO Max includes Porky who vigorously sucks the snake venom from Daffys leg; Sylvester haunted by the ghost of Tweety; and a cameo of Satan. Some of the cartoons, said the creators, are still in limbo.

Some of them may have gone a little too far, so they could come out in a different format, said Browngardt. Maybe they’ll go out packed for some type of Adult Swim thing. (Cartoon Network, home to the cheerfully absurd Adult Swim programming block, is part of the Warner Bros. empire.)

In many ways, said Ryan, the toons are both timeless and not of that era. In this wave of the fight against bullying, everyone must be friends, everyone must get along, he said.

Looney Tunes is pretty much the antithesis of that, he continued. His two characters in conflict, sometimes becoming quite violent.