In HBO Max’s “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” a reboot of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, “wabbit” season will look a little different for Elmer Fudd.
Bugs Bunny’s adversary, like all characters in the new animated series, will not have a gun.
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"We're not doing guns," executive producer and showrunner Peter Browngardt told the New York Times. "But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in."
While Elmer Fudd won’t have his cartoon rifle, he and the show’s other gun-less characters — including formerly pistol-toting Yosemite Sam — will have other classic Looney Tunes items at their disposal including sticks of dynamite, Acme-brand booby traps and bank safes dropped on fellow characters, according to the New York Times.
Online, the reaction to the nixing of guns has been swift.
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Despite the absence of guns, however, Browngardt said the new round of cartoons, which comes several decades after Looney Tunes’ golden age, were treated the same way as the old productions.
“I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros. had never stopped making ‘Looney Tunes’ cartoons?’” said Browngardt. “As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
In one new cartoon, Elmer Fudd begins chasing Bugs Bunny with a scythe before Bugs stuffs a stick of dynamite into his adversary’s mouth. The chase continues as Bugs tosses dynamite at Elmer while the hare hunter is in a log, on a unicycle, on top of a biplane and while the two fall from the sky. A final blow-up comes when Bugs jams a birthday cake topped with dynamite into Elmer’s mouth.
“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” storyboard artist Ryan Khatam told the New York Times. “‘Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”
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