Brooks Barnes of the Wall Street Journal reports today on one of the more bizarre brand extensions I've seen in a while. Apparently Warner Brothers is looking to "breathe new life into its animated Looney Tunes franchise and prop up the...slumping Kids' WB line-up" by creating "angular, slightly menacing-looking versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for its new series, dubbed 'Loonatics' and set in the year 2772."
I loved Looney Tunes 25 years ago, but I'm no purist--I have no problem with Warners recycling the characters and updating them to appeal to today's kids. But they're going about it all wrong. The appeal of the original Looney Tunes characters was their humanity--they weren't wish-fulfillment heroes like Superman, or vacuous, saccharine figures like Mickey Mouse.
Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warners cast were by turns smug, frantic, sly, outraged, sarcastic, and sheepish. They were, in fact, a lot like us--they were human, far more so than any other animated characters, and in that sense were the precursors to the sophisticated animation of Toy Story and A Bug's Life.
Setting Daffy and Bugs 700 years in the future isn't going to make them any more contemporary--angular, menacing-looking makeovers notwithstanding. Even though the World War II and Bing Crosby references in the classic Looney Tunes must baffle kids today, they'll still be watched when "Loonatics" is a forgotten footnote.
