Play Time: Looney Tunes revamp
Warner Bros has just launched a reboot of the Looney Tunes franchise, as a Cartoon Network sitcom in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are housemates, living in suburbia with equally Looney neighbors. Heidi MacDonald has an not-impressed reaction at The Beat, in which she also comments about previous attempts to update and reinterpret the franchise (Tiny Toons, Loonatics Unleashed, etc).
Assuming for the sake of argument that this really has to happen, here's a challenge for writers or artists: How would you overhaul the Looney Tunes franchise? Give us a pitch, with character designs, characterizations, a description of how they'd be handled, and/or whatever it takes to get your reinterpretation across. Be as realistic or as fantastic as you see fit.
Assuming for the sake of argument that this really has to happen, here's a challenge for writers or artists: How would you overhaul the Looney Tunes franchise? Give us a pitch, with character designs, characterizations, a description of how they'd be handled, and/or whatever it takes to get your reinterpretation across. Be as realistic or as fantastic as you see fit.
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Comments
My first (not necessarily good, mind you) thought is this: the style of cartoons has changed since the Looney Toons were released, so I'd have them as, essentially, out of work actors. The episodes would have them trying to find work by guest starring in toons that are pastiches of other cartoons. So Bugs Bunny in Naruto.
If I could pull it off, I'd even stick to stop-motion animation rather than computerizing it. But the budgets probably wouldn't swing that way. So:
- Hire the best animators the budget can carry:
- Make it 2D. Strong, flat colors. If anybody suggests highlights and shading, have them watch SPACE JAM till they stop. Painted backgrounds optional, in the original style, but maybe with more current designs.
- Aim for a grown-up market. Afternoon or evening slots, not morning cartoons. Aiming at kids means selling to parents. And that means toning down anything that's offensive.
- Heck, totally be offensive!
- Another thing I'd keep is the seven-minute format. You can get away with a lot of mindless fun in seven minutes, but in a twenty mnutes episode you need a minimum of plot.
Changes I'd make:
- More female characters. Ethnic diversity isn't that much of an issue since they're all animals anyway. Of course, the human characters should be more diverse than they are.
- Revisit the characters to give them a bit of depth, get rid of some stereotypes. But not too much. What makes them strong is their simplicity. They work fine as templates for all kinds of stories and roles. Just make sure you know who to use when and how.
- I wonder if we'd get away with turning Yosemite Sam into some kind
of tea party style republican. Or maybe Elmer? Just as pointers. Character revamps should be modest rather than radical.
- Some of the formulas worked better than others. Bugs & Daffy were flexible enough to always pull off something extraordinary. Wylie & Roadrunner, on the other hand, are more formulaic. Their stories should eiteher have more of an arc or be shorter, maybe even down to Spy vs. Spy size fillers. Tweety & Sylvester are somewhere in-between, I think.
- Search for modern themes and TV formats that work with a Looney Tunes treatment. They used to have these perfect parodies of current movies & tv shows. I wonder how a Bugs Bunny version of CSI would look like? Fringe would probably be too easy.
No.
Looney Tunes needs fangs. It needs to have something that will appeal to kids as well as adults.
I don't know about you, but I remember that my first exposure to classics were adaptations done with Loony Tunes characters. I remember a version of Frankenstein starring Porky Pig. Now, I'm not saying that a Loony Tunes revamp should be "Loony Tunes Classics Animated." Far from it. But.
Something that Max said rang with me. Leave the characters as they are, mostly, but give them a modernized satirical bite. He suggested Yosemite Sam as a Tea Partier. Yes, and how about Elmer as a redneck. Marvin the Martian could be used to satirize terrorism.
Basically, the shorts (and I agree with Max that they need to be short) would be on two levels: one for the kids, classic over-the-top antics of these beloved characters. But on a second level, contemporary satire that will make the parents laugh. That's what makes the best animated movies work so very very well. Despicable Me and Megamind worked on those two levels. I haven't seen Hop, but I'm told that one also does it quite nicely, playing with the generation gap/slacker problems.