The Historical Case of the Looney Tunes
The concept of sound in film shook up audiences and critics everywhere in the late 1920s. The first attempts at the elusive “talking picture” were filled with malfunctions that seemed to steer audiences and critics away from the idea. But once studios discovered how to synchronize sound with images, “talkies” took off.
It wasn’t long before Walt Disney introduced the first Mickey Mouse cartoon with synchronized sound, busting open the door for other animation to do the same. In 1929, Disney began producing musical short films called Silly Symphonies. Soon after, other studios created their own versions of the musical cartoons. One of the most notable competitors was Warner Brothers who named their rival cartoons Merrie Melodies and of course, Looney Tunes.
This week, we’re taking a look at the history of one of the oldest properties under the Warner Brothers brand. This wacky gang of characters have become synonymous with cartoons, and fans have watched them evolve over the course of 90+ years. So come join us as we uncover the history of The Looney Tunes.
Before we start talking about the animation, let’s talk a little bit about the history of Warner Brothers.
At the end of the 19th century, the Warner (originally Wonskolaser) family immigrated to the United States. There were 12 children, four of which would one day create the third-oldest film studio in Hollywood. The brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack became obsessed with moving pictures. The story goes that their father sold his watch and his horse to get the money his sons needed to break into the film business.
After acquiring a Kinetoscope projector, the Warner Brothers opened their first theater in New Castle, PA. Their sister played the organ while Jack, the youngest of the four brothers, chased movie-goers out of their seats once the film had ended. It wasn’t long before the brothers turned to film distribution and formed The Duquesne Film Exchange in the early 20th century. Eventually, they moved their headquarters to California and began producing their own films. In April 1923, they officially established Warner Brothers Pictures, INC.
Sam Warner pushed for the studio to start incorporating sound into their films, something that was (quite literally) un-head-of at the time. In 1925, he convinced his brothers to purchase Western Electric’s synchronized sound system. With it, they formed The Vitaphone Company and were now able to start experimenting with the concept of talking pictures. In 1927, Warner Brothers released what is now considered to be the first talking picture: The Jazz Singer. It wasn’t long before other studios caught up and were able to make their own talking pictures as well. Soon, talkies became the standard for film, and cinema was never the same.
Looney Tunes
In order to explain how Warner Brothers’ animation department got started, we have to talk about Walt Disney (again). Back before Mickey Mouse, Disney and his partner Ub Iwerks created the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit after producer Charles Mintz was unhappy with the cost of their live-action/animation hybrid shorts. After making a deal with Universal, Mintz saw the potential for the character. He left to create his own animation studio and took Oswald with him.
Former Disney animators Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising were in charge of the animation department until Universal pulled the plug on their version of Oswald, and gave the property to Walter Lantz. Luckily Warner Brothers had decided that they wanted their own animation studio, and they hired Harmon and Ising along with Isadora “Friz” Freleng to lead the team. Other former Disney animators joined them, like: Carmen “Max” Maxwell, Norm Blackburn, Paul Smith, and Rollin “Ham” Hamilton.
They brought with them some of the techniques that they had used in Disney’s cartoons, and Warner Brothers would soon be able to synchronize sound with their animation just as seamlessly as Disney.
A major studio with its own animation division was groundbreaking! Warner Brothers’ animation department was located in a building called “Termite Terrace.” It was the birthplace of The Looney Tunes.
Before releasing Steamboat Willie, Disney turned to musician Carl Stalling to write the music for the short. After its success, Stalling gave Disney the idea to create animated shorts to music, a series of films that would be called, “Silly Symphonies.” Stalling wrote the music for the early “symphonies” before starting a career with Warner Brothers. With his musical genius, Warner Brothers would be able to create a series of short films to rival Disney’s Silly Symphonies.
When you think of the Looney Tunes there are probably specific characters that come to mind such as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and more. The very first ones you may not even know. After the clear success of Steamboat Willie as a sound cartoon, Harman and Ising concocted a character to, in a sense, rival Mickey Mouse. His name was Bosko.
Harman and Ising created their first Bosko short, Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid after losing the Oswald job at Universal. They planned to get a studio to approve a cartoon series around the character, but Paramount and Universal turned them down. They had contracts with other cartoons and did not want more, what they called “filler.”
While other prominent cartoon characters at the time were starting to take off, Bosko never really saw the same success, and for good reason. He was a racist characature of a blank child.
One of Bosko’s frequent animators, Jack Zander, wrote to author Christopher Lehman and said, “There was, in fact, a joke about who or what Bosko was. We had a cleaning man or ‘handyman’ or whatever who used to hang around the studio and he asked me one day, ‘You got Mickey the Mouse and Felix the Cat but Bosko the What?’ I couldn’t answer. No one admitted openly that [h]e was a little black boy. But, it was true.”
Zander went on to explain that the animators made Bosko look as much like Mickey as possible. They were instructed to copy Mickey’s movements, but Disney hardly noticed or cared.
After Paramount and Universal passed on Bosko, producer Leon Schlesinger from Pacific Art and Title expressed interest. Schlesinger had worked with Harman and Ising before and was happy to promote them to Warner Brothers. Schlesinger won over Warner Brothers by pitching the idea that they could use this cartoon series as a way to promote popular songs from their films and publishing companies. Schlesinger would be Producer and Warner Bros. would be the distributor.
Warner Bros. approved one season, and Harman and Ising created the name Looney Tunes, an obvious rewording of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. While Looney Tunes featured original music, Merrie Melodies promoted the popular songs from the Warner Brothers catalog.
The very first Looney Tune was released in May of 1930 and was called “Sinking in the Bathtub” and starred Bosko.
Bosko would end all of his cartoons by saying, “That’s all, folks!”
In 1933 Harman and Ising had disagreements with Schlesinger over budget and decided to take their copyrighted Bosko to MGM. They had learned from Walt Disney’s mistake and made sure to own the rights to the character, effectively erasing Bosko from the Looney Tunes (good riddance). Although Bosko was gone, this was not the end of the Looney Tunes’ use of insensitive racial stereotypes. But, Bosko’s departure opened the door for Looney Tunes’ most classic characters.
Schlesinger brought on Jack King and Tom Palmer (more former Disney talent) to direct the animation. Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng stayed on and created the character Buddy, a young boy with “no particular uniqueness about him.” Buddy lasted only two years and was not missed after he expired.
During this time, Chuck Jones was promoted to the position of animator for Buddy. Jones said that he was truly not prepared at that time but that luckily he could not make Buddy any worse than he already was. (He was quite a boring character.)
Buddy was important because he was their animation test dummy. The new artists were learning the techniques needed to build even better characters later on.
Chuck Jones is one of the most famous animators of the Looney Tunes. In his book “Chuck Amuck,” he describes two Golden Ages in animation history. One (which we have discussed before) was Disney’s. The second, he says, is Warner Brothers’ that started with the short A Wild Hare in 1940 and lasted until 1963.
Chuck Jones wrote of working at Warner Brothers, “As was once pointed out, money cannot buy poverty, and money cannot buy laughter either. At least at Warner Bros. Cartoons, no effort was exerted to do so. We were grotesquely underpaid, but we were being paid to associate every day with people we loved and respected, people who were eager, excited, and joyfully willing to try almost anything.”
The Steps in Making a Classic Cartoon
Before television, the Looney Tunes were made only for a theatrical release. The studio hoped that the shorts would have a four or five-year life expectancy. Thankfully they lasted and would later be released on TV as the Bugs Bunny/ Road Runner shows and more.
Each classic cartoon started with an idea. The storyman would take the premise of the cartoon and draw it in panels to submit to the director. The director, if they liked it, would then help the storyman revise it. Once the story sketches were done, a story meeting would happen. This is where everyone, ALL the directors and animators, would come together and have what they called a “Yes Session.” In this session, nobody could say no. The point was to toss out good ideas to make it better.
The sketches and story went through several departments for layout, background, animation, ink, and paint.
Voices were recorded next. The animators were able to use the timed soundtrack from the exposure sheet to manage the number of drawings per scene. In each second of the film, there were about 12 to 24 pencil animation drawings.
The Looney Tunes would be nothing without their most iconic characters, which started appearing in the mid to late 1930s, nearly 10 years after the Looney Tunes first started. Let’s talk about just a few of these characters (we can’t discuss them all, sorry!)
Have you ever wondered why Porky Pig is the one to declare “That’s all Folks” at the end of each cartoon? It’s because he was the first Looney Tune to gain the hearts of the nation. He became so popular that he even had his own comics!
He first appeared amongst a handful of school age animals in Friz Freleng’s “I Haven’t Got a Hat.” (1935)
In 1937, Warner Brothers used the song “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” to introduce another one of Porky’s shorts. The song was written by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin and it had appeared in Merrie Melodies as part of the Warner Brothers collection of music. After this, the song became known as the Looney Tunes theme song, playing over the title card for every short.
Porky’s design changed over the years, including his age, but the one thing to stay the same was his stutter.
His original voice actor was Joe Dougherty who actually did have a stutter. Since this was the case, it usually took hours to record his parts. Eventually they replaced him with actor Mel Blanc to cut down on recording time and to save money.
Warner Brothers had continued with ending their cartoons by having the lead character say “That’s all, folks!” Porky expanded on this by breaking through a drum to then say the line.
Though he was eclipsed by our next two characters, Porky Pig has remained the last face that viewers see at the end of every Looney Tunes short.
Before there was Space Jam or Looney Tunes Back in Action, Friz Freleng directed an adorable live-action and animation short in 1940 where Daffy Duck is trying to push Porky out as the star of the studio.
Fun fact: Often when dubbed in other countries Porky does not have a stutter!
The next biggest character to appear was Daffy Duck in the short called “Porky’s Duck Hunt” from 1937.
Daffy from the beginning has been a wild duck, and we mean that in character. His manic behavior always gave the audience something to talk about.
When paired together, Porky was often the straight man to Daffy’s ridiculous antics.
Daffy has always been characterized as having a major self-ego with envy and greed.
He has had many alter egos. Some examples are Cluck Trent and Stupor Duck, Detective Duck Drake, Dorlock Holmes, Friar Duck, Duck Twacy, and Scarlet Pumpernickel.
Mel Blanc also voiced Daffy Duck. When Looney Tunes first debuted, the concept of Voice actors was entirely new. Voice actors hardly received credit for their work and would often be underpaid. We mentioned this also in our episode on June Foray, the woman that voiced many Looney Tunes characters alongside Mel Blanc.
Blanc was a little bit of an exception to this rule. Due to his contract, he was not only credited for his parts, he also voiced almost every major Looney Tunes character for several years.
As time went on, the popularity of Porky Pig gave way for the biggest star in The Looney Tunes universe: Bugs Bunny.
In our Space Jam episode we talked about a time when Bugs Bunny was the biggest cartoon character in the world. He was the second animated character to earn a star on the Hollywood walk of fame, and was voted to be America’s 2nd favorite character (real or imaginary) in 1976. He lost to Abraham Lincoln.
Bugs started appearing in films in the late 1930s, but it wasn’t until 1940 in a film called, “A Wild Hare” did the world meet Bugs Bunny in his full form. Although the idea of a rabbit character originally came from animator Ben “Bugs” Hardaway; Friz Freling, Chuck Jones, and Tex Avery are credited with giving Bugs his “wise-ass” personality.
The final touch for Bugs was Mel Blanc’s voice that gave him his trademark street-smart attitude. When animator Ben “Bugs” Hardaway showed Blanc the new drawing, Bugs reportedly said, “A tough little stinker, isn’t he?” Which suddenly gave Blanc the idea of a Brooklyn accent.
Bugs Bunny used many tactics to evade those that hunted or pursued him. One such maneuver was to dress in drag. This was set in a similar fashion as the vaudeville comedies or silent movie characters of the 20s.
The character Elmer Fudd was later introduced as an antagonist for Bugs. Fudd is a human hunter and his name was originally Egghead.
Another famous duo from The Looney Tunes is Wile E Coyote and Road Runner. Both characters never utter a word, except for an occasional “beep-beep”
Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese would always put 11 blackout gags in each Road Runner cartoon.
In the short “Soup or Sonic,” Coyote actually does catch the Runner! He was reduced in size though and is holding onto the Runner's gigantic legs. He then holds up a sign that says “Okay wise guys, you always want me to catch him. Now what do I do?”
No outside force was allowed to harm Wile E Coyote. His shortfalls would always be his own ineptitude (like gravity) and the ACME products. One shortfall is that he always wants to catch the Runner smartly. He has highly elaborate and high concept traps set.
Chuck Jones, in his book Chuck Reducks, says “The Road Runner’s immortal “beep-beep” was an accidental find, inspired by the sound Paul Julian made as he blindly tried to clear a route for himself along a Termite Terrace corridor. It seemed unimaginable to ask anybody but Paul to record this sound, so we invited him into the studio.”
However due to Mel Blanc’s contract, Paul Julian was uncredited as the road runner.
Looney Tunes is one of the longest-lasting properties in Hollywood. Its history teaches us a lot about the animation of the 20th century. It has gone through many changes, and even though it doesn’t appear to be as popular today as it was several decades ago, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
The collection of characters is so expansive, it’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t have one that brought them joy over the years. And as these Looney Tunes change to be more accessible to modern audiences, they will still find ways to stay relevant to modern audiences. So, even after all this time, that’s NOT all, Folks!
Sources:
Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck
https://www.looper.com/251260/the-history-of-looney-tunes-explained/
1989 interview with Chuck Jones https://www.wvtf.org/2022-11-24/the-fresh-air-interview-with-looney-tunes-animator-chuck-jones
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/a-letter-from-jack-zander/