Looney Tunes poo!

Watch a tape of this stuff the other day, and it was incredible. The backgrounds and character design was mid-century modernism at its finest. The tape included a few classics such as "Rabbit of Seville" and the first Tasmanian Devil cartoon. The humor was still hilarious and the sound design was flat-out futuristic. This stuff - at least the golden era Chuck Jones/Mel Blanc stuff - is high art, make no doubt about it.

I know that many of these shorts were edited for 80s television when I first encountered them as a kid, but does anyone remember if the near-rape in The Scarlet Pumpernickel was left intact? It and Daffy's shooting himself in the head at the end (which I'm pretty sure was cut for later TV broadcast) always startle me upon seeing this cartoon now?

The suicide gag is really great, particularly his quip after he kills himself

There's also that one where bugs and Yosemite Sam are running for mayor, and at the end of the short it's revealed that everyone voted for a mare instead, and faced with this absurdity the two of them start playing Russian roulette. Iris out. Bang.

(They chickened out & followed this with an iris in showing that bugs somehow missed, but it's still a dark joke)

Yes! That Bugs/Sam cartoon was another that I loved as a kid, and then was genuinely shocked, years later, when I saw the unedited version.

rewatching these as an adult, it's a little startling how many of the jokes involve characters getting shot or committing suicide.

bob clampett loved this joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqPQz39L-G8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25UWjsVifA

lol how is that not an established ilx response meme

Being an animator during the depression must've been depressing.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x686bw_devil-s-feud-cake_shortfilms

Yosemite Sam dies and goes to hell.

https://vimeo.com/54515426

This one is a pretty amazing Yosemite Sam and I love Bugs Bunny's intro, leaning slyly on a doorframe, slowly rolling a cigarette.

I saw a screening of the banned propaganda/racist LTs like Bugs Bunny Nips the N*ps about 20 years ago, and hoooo boy... Never again.

re: original question, Duck Amuck, clearly.

I saw a 1938 Frank Tashlin LT, Now That Summer Is Gone, last night, about a squirrel with a gambling problem. Anyway, per iMdB:

When the "inspector squirrel" stamps the acorns as they roll by him, the image that is left on the acorns is the exact/precise Hebrew - correct letters and vowels - for the word "KOSHER."

see here

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4ttl3i

Wile E. Coyote is a protagonist and I will not be taking arguments

i watched a Road Runner last night too (Whoa! Be-Gone) for the first time in many years and laughed my ass off.

of course those are about him, who cares about the stupid RR?

When the "inspector squirrel" stamps the acorns as they roll by him, the image that is left on the acorns is the exact/precise Hebrew - correct letters and vowels - for the word "KOSHER."

LOL, yes, this was cool.

Bugs Bunny is Jewish btw

clearly Elmer Fudd isn't

both Mel Blanc! so yes

Yeah, but wabbits ain't kosher.

I mean I guess Elmer could be Reform.

I'm relieved to see no one picked Tweety Bird as their favorite. As a child I loved nearly all the Warner cartoons, but as I recall it, the clean simplicity of Wile E. Coyote's endless quest to eat the Roadrunner was the most enthralling to me.

Just watched a (pretty racist) Merrie Melodies, directed by Tashlin, which has so many cultural references specific to 1938 that it's verging on the incomprehensible. It has it's own wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_You_Got_Any_Castles%3F.

Next up a Will Hay film (from 1939). Perfect Saturday afternoon telly.

Bugs Bunny is Jewish btw

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, September 18, 2019 1:38 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

A remarkable amount of American comedy created by Jews features characters who are running for their lives. These characters escape their enemies and achieve freedom not by outrunning or outshooting their oppressors but by transforming themselves into someone else. The ability to create and re-create a self is fundamental to the freedom of theatrical liberalism, and the late 1920s and 1930s witnessed an explosion of Jewish-created popular performance styles, which celebrated changeability itself. The ethnic comedians of vaudeville, who could adopt a character with the change of a hat, a nose, a feather, or colored face paint were a central feature of high-class Broadway revues of the 1920s and ’30s such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the George White Scandals. In a flash, Eddie Cantor transformed himself from Jewish neurastheniac to Greek cook, to black errand boy, to Indian chief and back again in the play and film Whoopee (1928). Fanny Brice was well known for her ability to do “imitations.” Willie Howard, in the smash hit Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, miraculously transformed himself from Jewish taxi driver, to a woman, to a variety of famous performers (Maurice Chevalier, Al Jolson, etc.) to a western sheriff, to an Indian chief.63 In Betty Boop (created by the Fleischer Brothers) and Looney Tunes (created by a team of mostly Jewish Warner Brothers artists including Mel Blanc) cartoons, characters regularly changed shape, size, character, gender, costume, and performance style in order to outwit pursuers or seduce lovers. In “A Hare Grows in Manhattan,” one of a number of stories of Bugs Bunny’s early years, Bugs spends the entire cartoon escaping a pack of enormous dogs on the Lower East Side by putting on various costumes, voices, accents, and characters. Likewise, in explaining the origin of his iconic line, “What’s up, Doc?,” in yet another animated bio-pic, Bugs Bunny shows how he turned the trope of transformation and escape (from Elmer Fudd) into theatrical gold. Superheroes Superman and Batman, invented by Jewish comic book artists in the 1930s, similarly based their success on their ability to change identity, thereby eluding and ultimately triumphing over their enemies.

In “A Hare Grows in Manhattan,” one of a number of stories of Bugs Bunny’s early years, Bugs spends the entire cartoon escaping a pack of enormous dogs on the Lower East Side by putting on various costumes, voices, accents, and characters.

One of my favourites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgZlw4O1qzk

https://lostmediawiki.com/Speaking_of_Animals_(partially_lost_Tex_Avery_short_film_series;_1941-1949)

Copy/pate the link, there's an issue with the code

The videos are watermarked, but not actually locked or restricted as they appear in the menu.

"Duck Amuck" for sure, but for more standard type Looney Tunes, "Rabbit Seasoning" ('Pronoun trouble...') or "Robin Hood Daffy"