Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck

Revamped Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck

Bugs Bunny and his gang of loonies are planning to make a comeback in the “Looney Tunes Show”, a half-hour weekly series scheduled to air this fall on the Cartoon Network.

The show will take place in a typical suburb where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck now live as housemates. Their neighbours will include Porky Pigs, Tweety Bird, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam.

Think “Desperate Housewives” but with cartoon characters instead of, uh…housewives.

The creators of the new show are probably feeling a huge load of pressure, because reinventing those classic characters is no easy task. Bugs Bunny and his gang are still an integral part of our culture, even though most of their classic cartoons were created in the 1950s.

Looney Tunes are the epitome of TV cartoons (my personal favorite is the masterpiece Rabbit of Seville), so the bar is set very high. Future versions of the show will inexorably suffer from comparisons.

Snapshots of the new character designs have started to appear on the web, and the illustrators have already been receiving both criticism and appraisal from fans of the old cartoon series.

What struck me in particular is the size of Bugs Bunny’s feet. I feel it will take me some time to get accustomed to those. The characters look different from their original version, but that’s the artist’s vision and we have to respect that.

Who knows? Maybe Bugs Bunny’s big feet will help him land a job as Dr Schoell’s spokesperson…


"Is this real meat?"

A scene from upcoming Looney Tunes show

Anyway you can’t really criticize the look of a cartoon character until you see him in action. I remember the first time I saw Bart Simpson on a t-shirt I thought he was some mutant kid with a bad case of jaundice.

I would recommend to the creators of the new series to make sure the characters stay true to their original personality. In my opinion this is the most important aspect of character design, and unfortunately I’ve seen too many cartoon characters personalities (d)evolve from edgy to boring.

Bugs Bunny is a good-natured rabbit who can quickly become mischievous if one plays tricks on him or invades his territory. He’s not cocky, just very confident. There’s a thin line between being confident and cocky but Bugs Bunny never crossed that line. This subtlety is a very important aspect of Bugs’ personality.

It remains to be seen whether the new suburban set-up will work. For Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to settle down in a house is quite a change. In the old days, they were carefree vagabonds constantly on the move from one episode to the other.

Still, it would be funny to see how Daffy Duck would interact with jehovah’s witnesses knocking at his door.


Also, let’s hope it doesn’t turn into an animated version of a clichés-ridden sitcom. Unfortunately, this has already happened to what used to be my favorite cartoon tv show some years ago.

Revamping classic cartoon characters is in vogue these days. Mickey Mouse is returning to his roots in the “Epic Mickey” videogame, and Yogi Bear is set to star in a live-action/CGI movie later in 2010. I wrote about this before, and I will ask again: could this be a consequence of our evolving socio-economic context?

As for the Looney Tunes, maybe people will find comfort in characters from their childhood, a time when socio-economic conditions were not as harsh as they are today. Back then, there were no credit swap derivatives nor bank bailouts to stress over.

I truly hope that Warner Brothers successfully pull this attempt of reviving the Looney Tunes. It’s a franchise that deserves to live on.