TV Rewind: Rediscovering the Joy of Looney Tunes
Photo Courtesy of HBO Max
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
For parents of young kids, the importance of finding bonding activities to do together, games you can play, or TV shows/movies you can watch that engage and entertain both of you despite the considerable age and maturity difference, is vital in building a lasting relationship. Sure, we can pretend to be into Magic School Bus or Octonauts as a personal sacrifice of our time in the name of our child learning about the human body or marine biology. But we also have to remember that kids have an inherent need to be meaninglessly silly and anarchic, and we can certainly benefit from a dose of giddy absurdity to break into our logic and responsibility-driven lives as well. In that sense, HBO Max’s giant and versatile library of old Looney Tunes cartoons is a gift from Bugs.
The UI of the new HBO-on-roids streaming service certainly pushes you to watch their newly produced Looney Tunes cartoons first, which are admittedly wickedly funny and edgy for our time period. But as someone who grew up on old-school Daffy and Bugs, I had to share their timeless and universal genius with my first grader. Consider it my attempt of passing the torch between generations—or the lit stick of dynamite, in this case.
The way HBO Max lays out the cartoons in chronological order offers an opportunity for Tunes nerds like me to study the differences in animation techniques and styles over the decades, as well as to gauge how each character evolved over time. But the main element that results in such a positively silly shared experience with my daughter lies in Looney Tunes powerhouses Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones’ distinct ability to link meticulously constructed over-the-top gags with shoestring premises, ones that give their hero characters a wide berth to torture the major antagonists. Let’s also not forget Mel Blanc’s voice acting for pretty much all of the characters, which iconized them almost more than their visual designs.
Sure, bullies and selfish jerks get their due through well-placed dynamites that transform them into statues made of soot, but the primary directive for Looney Tunes is to make you giggle as if the problems of the outside world don’t exist. The sight of Yosemite Sam constantly running into the gunpowder room every time Bugs Bunny lights a match and throws it in there is hilarious whether you’re six or forty. But where to begin, when dastardly indoctrinating your child to the joys of Looney Tunes, like a sinister Marvin the Martian experiment?
My instant recommendation is to pick out as many Coyote/Road Runner cartoons as possible. The famished Coyote’s Sisyphean mission to catch and eat the non-chalantly superfast Road Runner doesn’t offer any other narrative premise, resulting in the freedom to only link one explosive gag after the other. Sure, there are some callbacks within the same shorts from time to time, but you can pretty much line up any number of gags from any number of random cartoons and play them on shuffle without noticing a break in the “narrative flow.” Thus, the Road Runner/Coyote shorts introduce us to the core of what Looney Tunes is all about.
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