What’s up, doc? A new book explores the rise and fall of Looney Tunes

Toronto (NEWS 1130) – There are two types of people in the world: Disney people and Warner Brothers people. You could say Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes is a book for Warner Brothers people.

“I’m a Disney person who wishes he was a Warner Brothers person,” admits author and former Maclean’s writer Jaime Weinman. “I would love to be Bugs Bunny: the winner who is so clever and manages to come out on top while still being funny, but I’m probably more like Mickey Mouse: the meek, mild-mannered suburban dweller, who isn’t particularly funny but is at least likable. So, I aspire to be Bugs, but I know I’m basically Mickey!”

In Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite, Weinman traces the backstory of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the artists who created them, through the Golden Era of the mid-1940s through to the more recent Space Jam films.

“Well, I’ve always loved the Looney Tunes cartoons ever since I was a child and they’re among the few cartoons that I watched that I could grow up and find they were actually better than I thought they were as a kid,” he says.

Decades later, Weinman agrees the classic shorts have maintained their staying power.

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“When we talk about Looney Tunes cartoons, we’re talking about a style and an attitude that are among the best comedy ever produced for film and among the most influential,” he explains. “They were made for theaters to play before feature films produced by Warner Brothers and the audience would laugh at a funny cartoon before the movie started and that would make them more likely to go to the theater.”

Weinman pegs the decline of the franchise to the late 50s with the widespread popularity of TV.

“Two of the best Looney Tunes writers jumped ship to Hanna-Barbera, which was the new production company for low-budget television animation,” he explains.

“Of course, Looney Tunes cannot afford to keep their best writers because they could not pay them as much for a few seven-minute short cartoons a year as they were getting for writing many more television cartoons,” Weinman adds.

“That’s been the issue ever since is how do we create new material with these characters when they were meant to appear in a type of cartoon that no longer exists.”

There have been many attempts to revive the Looney Tunes franchise over the years. 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy is the latest and one of the more successful attempts to introduce Bugs Bunny and Company to a new generation.

“I try in the book to be positive about most of the Looney Tunes revivals, or at least say something positive about them, because it’s not fair to compare them to the classic cartoons which had so much more money to throw around and so much more confidence in the style,” Weinman says.

“I think one reason the Space Jam movies are so popular is that, by teaming Bugs up with the other Looney Tunes characters and with basketball players, they are introduced as characters people can relate to, while also presenting them in ways that old school fans can at least appreciate.”

One challenge is evolving tastes as well as the eternal debate about violence in animation.

“The old cartoons are less edited for violence than they used to be,” he points out. “I think, because they are old, and people accept them for what they are. So, I think that the big problem is for the newer cartoons. How do we make new cartoons with less violence? And that’s a problem they’re still trying to solve.”

Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes is published by Sutherland House Books.