Looney Tunes: Difference between revisions

''When he plays his fiddle I just go on a spree''

''It's a cinch that every time I go on the air''

 

 

Originally, [[Artifact Title|as the names indicate]], these cartoons were meant to rip off the sweet, sentimental musical shorts then in vogue: for instance, Disney's ''[[Silly Symphonies]]''. That basing cartoons around popular public-domain songs—or, even better, ones the studio already owned—was a fast and relatively cheap way of producing them didn't hurt any, either.

 

 

When ''Looney Tunes'' switched to color in 1942, and the ''Merrie Melodies'' line ditched the music around the same time in favor of its own rising star—one [[Bugs Bunny/Characters|Bugs Bunny]]—differences between the two were limited to their distinctive theme songs, until 1964 (when both series wound up using the same theme music as a result of using a modernized, and slightly bizarre, opening/closing sequence).

* [[Acme Products]] (indirectly) - the Coyote's quest to catch the Roadrunner with gadgets inevitably purchased from the Acme Corporation

* [[And Call Him George]] - the Abominable Snowman

* [[Duck Season! Rabbit Season!]]

* [[One Buwwet Weft]] (formerly)

* [[Pronoun Trouble]] (possibly; the phrase turns up in "Rabbit Seasoning", but refers to a series of variations on [[Duck Season! Rabbit Season!]] and has nothing to do with gender)

* [[Road Runner vs. Coyote]]

* [[Ash Face]]: A regular gag whenever firearms or explosions are involved. Sometimes the basis for a blackface gag.

* [[Aside Glance]]

* [[Ass in a Lion Skin]]: ''Very'' common, with rabbits as ducks (and vice-versa), cats as skunks, pigs as eagles, dogs as chickens, coyotes as roadrunners...

* [[Assumed Win]]:

** Also seen in the 1955 short "This is a Life?". Daffy assumes the program will be a retrospective about himself, when instead it's about Bugs.

* [[Ate the Spoon]]:

* [[Author Existence Failure]]: It's interesting to imagine what Milt Franklyn might've come up with for the remaining 3–4 minutes of "The Jet Cage" had he not died while scoring it.

* [[Bad Guy Bar]]: The bar from "Lady Play Your Mandolin". Keep in mind, this short was made and is obviously set during Prohibition, and the patrons of the bar proudly proclaim themselves as sinners.

* [[Bad Guys Play Pool]]: Dan Backslide in "[[The Dover Boys]]"

* [[Balloonacy]]:

** ''Bushy Hare''

** One particular example is in "The Whizzard of Ow", wherein during the climax, Wile E. Coyote's mode of transportation turns into a crocodile, which proceeds to bite the Coyote's nose off.

* [[Born in the Theatre]]: Most Looney Tunes, classic or modern, aired in theaters before they aired on television, and they often have gags messing with the [[Fourth Wall]] of [[Film]].

* [[Breaking the Fourth Wall]]: The damage done to it ranges from large cracks to pulverizing it to a fine powder. On more than one occasion, near the end of a cartoon, the film suddenly breaks, leaving the screen white. A character from the cartoon then steps out onto the white screen and says, "Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue with this picture."

* [[Breakout Character]]: THE WHOLE SERIES has lived and breathed this trope. It all started with Friz's [[Batman Gambit]] in 1935 to jump start Leon's ailing cartoon studio with several new cartoon characters in the short "I Haven't Got A Hat"-two pups named Ham and Ex, Kitty, Oliver Owl, Beans the Cat and Porky Pig. Porky was an instant hit with audiences, even though the studio thought for some reason that [[Flat Character|Beans]] would be the studio's next bankable star-but he too quickly faded into obscurity while Porky became the studio's star--'''THEN''', two more stars broke out from Porky's cartoons-a little [[Daffy Duck]] from "Porky's Duck Hunt" and the [[Bugs Bunny]] prototype "Happy Hare/Bugs' Bunny" from "Porky's Hare Hunt", "Hare-Um Scare-Um" and "Presto-Change-O." Oh, and Bugs Bunny himself obviously.

* [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]]: Chester from the two Chester And Spike shorts. Also a [[Pint-Sized Powerhouse]].

* [[Cut a Slice, Take the Rest]]: frequently, with various characters, and often with cake.

 

== D-E-F ==

** 1939's "[[Old Glory]]" is educational as well, though unlike the aforementioned Sloan shorts, it doesn't contain comedy at all. Rather, it's a history lesson on the Revolutionary War and the formation of the U.S., with Porky learning about it from Uncle Sam in the wraparounds.

* [[Eek! A Mouse!]]

* [[Epic Fail]]: Wile E. Coyote's specialty.

* [[Era Specific Personality]]

* [[Flanderization]]: Different directors often focussed on different aspects of a character, most notably with Daffy, Bugs, Elmer Fudd, and Porky.

** This even got a [[Lampshade]] during an [[Affectionate Parody]] of ''[[Invasion of the Body Snatchers]]''.

* [[Fluffy Cloud Heaven]]: "Sunday Go To Meetin' Time," "Clean Pastures," "Daffy Duck And The Dinosaur," "Back Alley Oproar."

* [[Force Feeding]]: "Pigs Is Pigs", "A Tale of Two Mice" and "Chow Hound"

* [[Forgot I Could Fly]]: This became a running gag for Daffy in the Duck Dodgers spin-off and recent webtoons on the Looney Tunes website.

* [[Funny Animal]]: Duh. All of them (including the human characters, like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam)

* [[Funny Foreigner]]: Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, and, to a lesser extent, Foghorn Leghorn (with his Southern accent) and Bugs Bunny (with his New York accent), for those who aren't originally from America.

 

== G-H-I ==

* [[Glove Slap]]: Seen in numerous cartoons when a character challenges another to a duel, but perhaps the most widely remembered one comes from "Hare Trimmed".

* [[The Golden Age of Animation]]: The original shorts were a product of this. Since then the characters have been successively (if not always successfully) deployed in the medium's [[The Dark Age of Animation|Dark]], [[The Renaissance Age of Animation|Renaissance]], and [[The Millennium Age of Animation|Millennium]] ages.

* [[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress]]: And it's ''always'' a looooong way down, especially in Wile E. Coyote's case. [[Gravity Is a Harsh Seamstress]], too.

* [[Hair-Trigger Avalanche]]: Demonstrated in "The Iceman Ducketh" when Daffy accidentally sets off an avalanche by shouting.

** ''Ballot Box Bunny'' (1951) has the iris close in as Bugs takes his turn at Russian Roulette. It opens back up on him to show he ducked out of the way of his shot, then another iris opens to show the shot hit Yosemite Sam.

* [[Iron Butt Monkey]]: Where to start? Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, [[Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick|Adolf]] [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]... and that's just the villains! [[Trope Codifier]].

 

== J-K-L ==

* [[Lazy Artist]]: It's extremely rare, but it's quite noticeable when it happens. Two occur in 1943's "Porky Pig's Feat": As Daffy issues a challenge to the hotel manager, a cel of Daffy is photographed painted side up in a frame (The redrawn version even renders that errant cel drawing!). At the end when Porky and Daffy discover Bugs Bunny in the adjacent room, Daffy's left arm is shown unpainted.

** Lampshaded in "Invasion Of The Bunny Snatchers" (1992). Pod carrots from space replace Daffy, Yosemite Sam and Elmer with poorly drawn and animated duplicates.

** Carl Stalling had a tendency to associate tunes with specific characters. Foghorn Leghorn sings or hums "The Camptown Races" in numerous shorts.

** "I Cover the Waterfront" was often used during establishing shots of docks and harbors.

* [[Loser Gets the Girl]]: In "Muscle Tussle", Daffy loses his girlfriend to a big, white muscular duck at the beach.

* [[Loveable Rogue]]: Charlie Dog (the dog who always harasses someone—usually Porky Pig—to be his master). Daffy sometimes played this role as well (especially under Robert McKimson's direction).

 

== M-N-O ==

* [[Made of Iron]]: Everyone.

* [[Mad Love]]: Pepé Le Pew, though there are some examples of this from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

** In "Daffy Doodles", he tells Porky to wait till J. Edgar Who's-Its hears about this.

** Bugs Bunny in "Roman Legion Hare" (which for some unknown reason has been left out of Cartoon Network's screenings of the cartoon):

* [[Musical Episode]]: "Swooner Crooner".

** "Katnip Kollege".

** Owl Jolson's, too, in "I Love to Singa".

* [[My God, What Have I Done?]]: This is pretty much Elmer Fudd's reaction whenever he ''thinks'' he's finally killed Bugs. No matter how hard he's been trying throughout the episode to shoot Bugs he always breaks down in tears when he thinks he's finally done it, calling himself a murderer. Which calls into question why he's a hunter in the first place.

** In ''Hare-Um Scare-Um'' (1939), hunter John Sourpuss tells proto-Bugs Bunny that "I can whip you and your whole family!" A bunch of bunnies arrive to take him up on the challenge—then the film cuts off. In the original ending, the looney rabbits beat Sourpuss up on-camera, eventually driving him looney himself. Though no hard evidence has been found, it's often speculated that the scene was deleted for being too similar to the ending of ''Daffy Duck And Egghead'' one year prior.

** "Ride Him, Bosko!" is probably the standout example; [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|the animators]] just [[Screw This, I'm Outta Here|up and leave]] without showing if Bosko rescues Honey or not.

* [[No Fourth Wall]]: [[Duck Amuck]] is one of the most famous and insane examples ever made.

* [[No Guy Wants to Be Chased]]: Is used quite often whenever a female [[Abhorrent Admirer]] goes after one of the male characters. Was also used in three Pepé Le Pew cartoons (1949's "For Scent-imental Reasons," 1952's "Little Beau Pepé ," and 1959's "Really Scent"), proving to modern audiences that, yeah, Pepé may be seen as a "rapist," but he's not a [[Karma Houdini]] (in those instances at least).

* [[Outlaw Couple]]: Bunny and Claude

* [[Overly Polite Pals]]: Mac and Tosh, the Goofy Gophers.

 

== P-Q-R ==

* [[Real Joke Name]]: Doctor Quack in ''The Daffy Doc''

* [[Rearrange the Song]]: There are different arrangements of each of the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes opening themes. In particular, "Merrily We Roll Along" and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" got a ton of adjustments over the years.

* [[Rebus Bubble]] combined with [[Talking with Signs]] gets you Bugs' mockery of his foes by holding up a sign with "(picture of a screw) + (picture of a baseball)" or a picture of bats circling a belfry.

* [[Recitation Handclasp]]: Giovanni Jones (the fat opera singer) assumes this posture in "Long Haired Hare."

* [[Russian Roulette]]: The end of "Ballot Box Bunny," provided you've actually seen it uncut.

** Cartoon Network screened the cartoon ''in its entirety'' on 9/26/11.

 

== S-T-U ==

* [[Stalker with a Crush]]: Though a lot of major and minor Looney Tunes characters have been this on occasion, Pepé Le Pew is possibly (nay, undisputedly) the only character whose schtick is this (along with [[Handsome Lech]], [[Mad Love]], [[Chivalrous Pervert]], [[Abhorrent Admirer]] [for both sexes], [[The Masochism Tango]] [1953's "Wild Over You"], [[Black Comedy Rape]] [if you believe Dave Chappelle and those uptight [[Moral Guardians]]], a pinch of [[No Guy Wants to Be Chased]], some [[The Hunter Becomes the Hunted]] for taste, and a nice helping of [[Double Entendre]])

* [[Stock Audio Clip]]: The Roadrunner's "Meep Meep".

** The first opening to The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show (i.e. the one without the new Darrell Van Citters animation) reuses the Bugs and Daffy song and dance animation from The Bugs Bunny Show's opening.

* [[Stuff Blowing Up]]: To the point where they [[Stock Footage|recycle the same explosion footage]] at almost every opportunity.

* [[Turtle Island]]: In "The Ducktators," an Emperor Hirohito duck places a sign on a turtle, who gets mad and beats him up with said sign (despite that the duck briefly stops him to show a button that reads, "I am Chinese"—a reference to Chinese-American immigrants who were mistaken for Japanese and were put in internment camps because of it).

* [[Uncancelled]]: A few times. The first was in 1953 when WB temporarily closed the cartoon unit for a few months, due to a variety of factors like the 3-D fad; the unit opened a few months later. The next was in 1963 when WB, facing increasingly stiff competition from TV and less theaters running theatrical shorts before movies, shut the cartoon unit down again. From 1964 to 1967, cartoons were produced at DePatie-Freleng instead. In 1967, production resumed at Warner Bros. but only two years later, the cartoon division was shut down for good.

* [[Unexplained Recovery]]:

** A [[Running Gag]] involves characters like Wile E. Coyote getting seriously injured and then being perfectly fine in the next scene with no explanation as to how they recovered from their injuries.

{{quote|'''Bugs Bunny''': Of course, the real beauty of this machine is that it has only one moving part.}}

 

* [[Verbal Tic]]: Fog- ah say, Foghorn Leghorn. Leghorn, that is.

* [[Victory by Endurance]]: In "Gorilla My Dreams", Bugs Bunny is being chased by a gorilla. Just when things seem hopeless for Bugs, he finds that by the time the gorilla has caught him he was too tired to beat him up and falls over exhausted.

{{quote|'''Daffy:''' (raving) Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers! And gunpowder! And cordite! I'm an elk -- shoot me! Go on, it's elk season! I'm a fiddler crab -- why don'tcha shoot me?! It's fiddler crab season!}}

** Elmer breaks down in this way in "What's Opera, Doc?" after being duped by Bugs disguised as Brunhilde. He then unleashes [[Disproportionate Retribution|his fury and the elements on Bugs]]:

* [[Visual Pun]]: A staple. Usually in the form of a character turning into a lollipop with the word "Sucker" emblazoned across it, a donkey with the word "Jackass" on it, or a heel with the words "First Class Heel" on it (in those days, a "heel" is what we would call these days a "jerk," "bastard," "asshole," or "douchebag").

* [[Vomit Discretion Shot]]: Despite being seasick many times in "Tweety's S.O.S.", we never actually see Sylvester vomit.

* [[Xylophone Gag]]: And they ''always'' fall for it.

** And the song is ''always'' "Those Endearing Young Charms."

* [[YouTube Poop]]: The short ''Daffy Duck in Hollywood'' is the [[Trope Maker]]—in 1938, no less!

 

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{{reflist}}

[[Category:Animated Films]]

[[Category:Films of the 1960s]]

[[Category:Kids WB]]

[[Category:The Renaissance Age of Animation]]

[[Category:Short Film]]

[[Category:Trope Overdosed]]

[[Category:Western Animation]]

[[Category:Zany Cartoon]]