IS THAT ALL, FOLKS? AFTER NUMEROUS BATTLES AND 27 SCRIPT DRAFTS, THE LOONEY TUNES ARE FINALLY 'BACK IN ACTION'.Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer You could forgive writer Larry Doyle for throwing up his hands and crying ``thuffering thuccotash'' more than once in the past couple of years as he has tried to bring the Looney Tunes franchise kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Doyle has been the point man in Warner Bros BROS Brothers BROS Benefits and Retirement Operations Section (King County, Washington) BROS Barnes and Richmond Operatic Society (London, UK) .' effort to revitalize its storied Looney Tunes franchise. He's the sole credited writer on the new feature film, ``Looney Tunes: Back in Action'' and is the head writer and executive producer of a series of animated Looney Tunes shorts that are intended to run before Warner Bros. movies, probably beginning next year with the ``Scooby Doo'' sequel. Doyle, best-known for his award-winning work as a writer and producer on ``The Simpsons,'' was thrilled to be given the chance and the budget to restore Looney Tunes characters This is the complete list of Looney Tunes characters organised after the year of their first appearance. Note: The more famous or noteworthy Looney Tunes characters are listed in bold. like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck Daffy Duck is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. Daffy was the first of the new breed of "screwball" characters that emerged in the 1930s to supplant traditional everyman characters, such as and Porky Pig Porky Pig is an Academy Award-nominated animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators (particularly to prominence, particularly with the six-minute shorts. Like a lot of people, Doyle believes the characters haven't been served particularly well recently, be it in the Michael Jordan This article is about the former basketball player. For other uses, see Michael Jordan (disambiguation). Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17 1963) is a retired American professional basketball player. vehicle ``Space Jam'' or children's cartoon series A cartoon series is a set of regularly presented animated television programs created or adapted for television broadcast with a common series title, usually related to one another. like ``Baby Looney Tunes'' and ``Animaniacs.'' Doyle, along with most at Warner Bros., wanted to restore their edge. ``The characters had been diminished in order to become a product for young children,'' Doyle says. ``The problem is, they don't compete that well in that juvenile area. I've got a young son, and while he likes 'Looney Tunes' just fine, he prefers 'Dragon Tales.' And that's the way it should be. Looney Tunes were always designed for adults and teens.'' Parting ways Doyle no longer works for Warner Bros. His contract ran out more than a year ago. He says he and his team of writers and animators completed eight shorts last December, and the studio has since ``watered down'' six of them and decided to shelve shelve v. shelved, shelv·ing, shelves v.tr. 1. To place or arrange on a shelf. 2. the other two. He's not particularly proud of the new movie, either, granting that ``it's not terrible'' but that it's also not as good as it could have been. What happened with Doyle is indicative of the war that has been waged at Warner Bros. for the past decade for nothing less than the soul of the Looney Tunes. Some, like Doyle, would like to see the cartoons return to the assertive irreverence that has made them so timeless since their golden age in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Others at Warner Bros. would also welcome a shift away from the infantilism infantilism /in·fan·ti·lism/ (in´fan-til-izm) (in-fan´til-izm) persistence of childhood characters into adult life, marked by mental retardation, underdevelopment of sex organs, and often dwarfism. of the ``Animaniacs,'' but not at the cost of losing sight of political correctness politically correct adj. Abbr. PC 1. Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. . ``Basically, what it has come down to,'' says one source familiar with the situation at the studio, ``is you simply have too many people offering too many opinions. And in the end, it saps a little bit of the spirit out of these projects when everyone feels the need to have their fingerprints on them.'' While one might be tempted to borrow an old phrase from Bugs Bunny - ``of course you know this means war'' - there is actually very little disagreement at Warner Bros. on several significant points. Namely: The Looney Tunes gang had fallen on hard times both before and since the 1996 movie ``Space Jam.'' The reasons for this decline include a lack of new product, general audience indifference to the characters' presence in ``Space Jam,'' the closing of the Warner Bros. Studio Stores and an inability to interest a new generation in characters other than the Tasmanian Devil Tasmanian devil, extremely voracious marsupial, or pouched mammal, of the dasyure family, now found only on the island of Tasmania. The Tasmanian devil, Sarcophilus harrisi, formerly found also in Australia, is about 2 ft (60 cm) long, excluding the 12-in. and Tweety Bird
More Duck, please ``You couldn't even find the cartoons in prime time on the Cartoon Network For Cartoon Network outside of the United States, see . Cartoon Network is a cable television network created by Turner Broadcasting which primarily shows animated programming. anymore,'' says film critic Leonard Maltin, who has written extensively about animation. ``That network (which is owned by Time Warner) gives more tender loving care to their new characters and Scooby Doo than they do to the Looney Tunes. So they need to be reintroduced, and they need to be reintroduced in a high-quality manner.'' With the studio's consumer products division executives begging for something new (there was nothing after ``Space Jam,'' save for a Tweety Bird direct-to-video movie in 2000), Warner's movie division commissioned screenplays. Doyle, who was much more interested in reintroducing the shorts than he was in writing a feature-length film, ultimately got the gig anyway, although by the end, the screenplay went through at least 27 revisions, including passes by notables like Roger Schulman (``Shrek''), David X. Cohen David X. Cohen (born July 13, 1966), born David Samuel Cohen, is an American television writer. He has written for The Simpsons, and he is the head writer and executive producer of Futurama. (``Futurama''), Adam Resnick Adam Resnick is an American comedy writer, from Harrisburg, PA. He is best known for his work writing for Late Night with David Letterman. In addition to his work on the Letterman show, Resnick also cocreated and wrote for Get A Life (``Death to Smoochy'') and Ed Solomon (``Men in Black''). ``Looney Tunes: Back in Action'' uses a story premise that was refined time and time again by the great director Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated , playing on Daffy's jealousy of Bugs' effortless success. Joe Dante, who featured the Looney Tunes characters in the opening credits Opening credits, in a television program, motion picture or videogame, are shown at the beginning of a show and list the most important members of the production. They are usually shown as text superimposed on a blank screen or static pictures, or sometimes on top of action in the sequence of his 1990 movie ``Gremlins 2: The New Batch,'' was a logical enough choice to direct. Like Doyle, Dante believed the Looney Tunes franchise needed to be brought back to its roots and wanted to steer clear of any gimmicks. Cartoon vision ``There hadn't been any singular vision in the last few years,'' Dante says. ``The characters just weren't consistent. By the time they got to 'Space Jam,' they could have been Woody Woodpecker woodpecker, common name for members of the Picidae, a large family of climbing birds found in most parts of the world. Woodpeckers typically have sharp, chisellike bills for pecking holes in tree trunks, and long, barbed, extensible tongues with which they impale and his pals for all that it mattered.'' ``It's kind of like what happened to Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse Famous character of Walt Disney's animated cartoons. He was introduced in Steamboat Willie (1928), the first animated cartoon with sound. Mickey was created by Disney, who also provided his high-pitched voice, and was usually drawn by the studio's head animator, all those years ago,'' Dante continues. ``He started out as this wild rodent, then they gave him a girlfriend, a house and a dog, and suddenly he wasn't that interesting anymore. He lost that edge.'' In attempting to restore that edge, ``Looney Tunes: Back in Action'' lacked one thing that Dante said it needed: a singular vision. In addition to the mind-boggling number of rewrites, sources say Dante feuded with Doyle, Doyle bickered with veteran animation director Eric Goldberg, and studio executives kibitzed with everyone involved. While such heated disagreements are typical when making a movie, the difference here was that each participant believed they were fighting not just for the film but for the future of the Looney Tunes franchise. ``There was a lot riding on this,'' says Dante, who at one point threatened to take his name off the production. ``I had some trepidation going in about that, but I was worried that if I didn't take it, someone else would and do it worse.'' ``Back in Action'' arrives in theaters today and has received good to middling reviews. Combined with the initial sales success of a four-DVD set of classic cartoons, ``Looney Tunes Golden Collection The Looney Tunes Golden Collection is a yearly series of four-disc DVD box sets from Warner Bros.' home video unit Warner Home Video, each containing about 60 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts. ,'' the Looney Tunes characters - which include Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam For the shortwave radio station, see . Yosemite Sam is an animated cartoon character in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons produced by Warner Bros. Animation. The name is somewhat alliterative and is inspired by Yosemite National Park. , Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote - are at least back in public view. Warner's home entertainment division has plans for many more volumes of DVDs, but the future of Doyle's completed shorts remains up in the air. ``I finished them and they tested well, but somewhere between the time I proposed them and finished them, they (Warner Bros.) turned back into a giant studio,'' Doyle says. ``They started second-guessing everything, even the basic concept of doing these cartoons in a spirit similar to the originals.'' Too many cooks ... ``It has simply become an executive pile-on,'' he continues. ``Anything that anyone had a concern about got changed. A bunch of changes were made over things that were put in precisely to remind people that these characters could be cutting-edge. Nothing was gratuitous. It's too bad, because these shorts are clearly the best ones that have been done since the '50s on all levels - animation, humor and characterization.'' Sources inside Warner Bros. dispute Doyle's contentions, saying the eight shorts were finished this summer and not in December - and that any changes made were done to improve the content as well as to head off potential criticism. One Warner Bros. spokesman says Doyle shouldn't bad-mouth bad·mouth or bad-mouth tr.v. bad·mouthed, bad·mouth·ing, bad·mouths Informal To criticize or disparage, often spitefully or unfairly: the cartoons because he hasn't seen the finished product. Besides, this source adds, Doyle isn't the only person who cares deeply about the Looney Tunes legacy. On the final point, there is no dispute. Warner Bros. has a huge financial stake in the continued success of Looney Tunes. Beyond that, there are a number of executives working there who grew up on the cartoons and would love nothing more than to add a new page to the legacy. For his part, Doyle would actually like to return to Warner Bros. and complete work on another 15 shorts that were well into development before the studio pulled the plug. ``If people saw these (cartoons) on Warner Bros. movies all the time, who knows ... maybe you might see teenage girls wearing Tweety T-shirts again,'' Doyle says. Adds Maltin: ``Comedy can't exist in a vacuum. It has to have some immediacy. The beauty of the Looney Tunes is that they had that in their day. I don't see any reason why they can't have it again, provided the right people are working behind the scenes.'' Glenn Whipp, (818) 713-3672 glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com CAPTION(S): 2 photos Photo: (1 -- cover -- color) LOONEY TUNING Getting Bugs & pals on same page was key to new film (2) no caption (Looney Tunes) |
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