New Looney Tunes

**New Looney Tunes** (originally titled Wabbit - A Looney Tunes Production for the First Season) is a Looney Tunes television series that premiered on September 21, 2015 on Cartoon Network with the episode called Buddha Bugs. The show is rated TV-Y7. Each thirty-minute episode contains four shorts, starring Bugs Bunny as the main character and other New and Old Looney Tunes characters like Squeaks, Daffy, Porky, Sylvester, Tweety and more, Bugs confronts other characters from the Looney Tunes shorts, as well as some new friends and enemies.

## **Plot**

Each episode of New Looney Tunes contains four shorts, starring Bugs Bunny from the Looney Tunes as the main character and other Looney Tunes stars like Tweety, Sylvester, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Other characters, such as Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, show up to annoy him. Some characters are given new traits: Wile, for example, is Bugs' smart-aleck neighbor, Yosemite Sam has a pudgy appearance and a larger mustache, Elmer Fudd do not try to hunt Bugs Bunny anymore now always ask him for help or attract it, while the Tasmanian Devil (renamed "Theodore Tasmanian") is employed as an accountant, though he represses his true self. Added in are new characters—a squirrel named Squeaks and a childlike version of Bigfoot—who come to befriend Bugs. Likewise, Bugs faces new villains, but not without the help of his friends.

## **Characters**

The main character of New Looney Tunes is Bugs Bunny (voiced by Jeff Bergman), who appears in all of the episodes in Season 1, in Season 2, other Looney Tunes characters appears, like Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, Pepe Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn and more, Bugs make new friends too like Squeaks, Bigfoot, and faces old enemies like Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd and new enemies like Jack, Carl The Grim Rabbit, Barbarian, Ninjas, Cal and more. To see pages for every character to appear in the show, thus far click here.

## **Episodes**

New Looney Tunes has 52 episodes and 104 shorts in Season 1, each with 11 minutes and 6 minutes of duration, to see the list of episodes of New Looney Tunes click here.

## **Intro**

The Intro in New Looney Tunes begins with Bugs eating a carrot. Then he slides down his rabbit hole while the theme song plays, and various other scenes from the episodes of the show are seen. The Intro concludes with Bugs coming out of the hole with an acorn, then Squeaks appears to give the carrot to Bugs Bunny and Bugs gives the acorn to Squeaks, Bugs chews on the carrot and the two smile and look at the title "Wabbit - A Looney Tunes PROD." or "New Looney Tunes" that appears on the right side of the screen. In Season 2, the intro changes, the scenario is the same hole as Bugs Bunny, but changes everything, in this Intro all the characters of the show appear out of the hole of Bugs Bunny, like Foghorn Leghorn, Dr. Clovenhoof, Wile. And Coyote and the Road Runner, Elmer Fudd, Cecil Turtle, Yosemite Sam, King Thess, at the end of the opening, before ending appears Tazmania grabbing Marvin the Martian's ship that makes him fly over the screen, making Bugs Bunny come out of his hole, Pulling down the show's name New Looney Tunes.

## **Outro**

The Outro begins with the ending of the episode with New Looney Tunes logo, so appears the credits along with the same Theme Song of Opening, the credits end up with the Logo of Warner Bros Animation.

## **Production**

    New Looney Tunes was announced in March 2014, along with other reboots of Warner Bros. classics, such as Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! and The Tom and Jerry Show, under the name Wabbit - A Looney Tunes Production. Sam Register, promoted to president of Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Digital Series a month prior, will be its supervising producer. Episodes will run for a half-hour.

The previous installment of the Looney Tunes franchise was The Looney Tunes Show, but it lasted for only two seasons, containing twenty-six episodes for each season. Warner Bros. acknowledged that The Looney Tunes Show strayed away from format and the Bugs and Daffy that people fell in love with and made them popular back in the day. Rather than making the series an animated sitcom, like The Looney Tunes Show was, the producers decided to go for an approach that would make the characters work, focusing on sight gags and the craziness that made the original shorts so critically acclaimed. The time for each short was also cut down to five minutes (down from seven minutes in the original shorts), which

was similar to how Disney cut down the time for their Mickey Mouse's shorts.

The concept of the show, according to producer Matt Craig, was to modernize it into the twenty-first century "with classic Bugs Bunny in modern day situations." The same idea in the thirties, forties and fifties are still there, but "we've time-traveled him" with more emphasis on storylines about cell phones and tablets, with less on coal mining.

The show was previewed in an article from a Comic-Con edition of TV Guide, stating that the show was written to match the tone of the Looney Tunes shorts. However, the producers sought to avoid their clichés—in particular, the anvil gag. The crew placed their emphasis on writing original stories, as well as devising "modern heavy objects to cause pain," according to producer Erik Kuska. Bugs' villains may include "barbarians and ninjas and terminators," Kuska said, describing Bugs as "at his best when he's up against a really good adversary."

The show was also restricted from using weapons that the original shorts were able to use, particularly the guns. In shorts featuring Yosemite Sam, guns were never pulled and former hunter, Elmer Fudd's role in the series was minimal, which backed up Kuska's comment where he said that Elmer Fudd "may not be the man" to be in the shorts anymore. The writers thought of workarounds and came up with jokes for the characters that avoided the modern prohibitions.

Bugs Bunny was no longer the top dog and above it all, according to Marc Craig in an interview. The producers noticed that Bugs had strayed from his original persona in the past twenty-thirty years of appearances in media, so they decided to go back to the Tex Avery/Chuck Jones style of lunacy that most audiences were familiar with, according to Matt Craig in another interview.

> " Yeah, it has a little more edge to it. I think one of the things we did was that we kind of rolled back to the rascally-ness of Bugs. You know, he’s a bit of a stinker, as he likes to point out. … I think that as other people have tried to do other incarnations, like any icon they start to clean him up and wash him out. We just went back to letting Bugs be Bugs and I think that’s part of the success of the show."
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> —Gary Hartle (producer) in an interview with CBR.
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> " Here's the thing: I don’t care what they do to that pig. If they keep bringing me back, I’m employed. So they can beat the heck out of Porky, they can make bacon out of Porky, I don’t care. It’s actually fun. Conflict is a fun thing to play."
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> —Bob Bergen (voice actor of Porky Pig) in an interview with ToonZone.
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Meanwhile, new characters such as Jack were introduced, only to be retired after a handful of appearance, due to similarities to previous foils to Bugs in the series, such as Yosemite Sam. A whole "new universe of Looney Tunes characters" were introduced in the first season, because the rights for majority of the original characters were unavailable for usage. Bugs Bunny was the primary focus of the show, while Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote also had prominent roles. Theodore Tasmanian made one appearance in the first season, as there was a "learning curve" to the character and adjustments were made to make Theodore an office employee.

Season 1 was slated for a Fall 2015 release. On January 5, 2015, Boomerang UK released a video showing the first sneak peek of the show. The show premiered on Cartoon Network abruptly on September 21, 2015, with less than a week's notice. Ratings ranged around one million for the first few weeks of the season, with the early intention for the show to be a sneak peak and premiere in its natural home, Boomerang, when it was October 2015. However, Cartoon Network decided to air the show simultaneously on Cartoon Network and Boomerang, due to the impressive ratings.

The show was pulled from the Cartoon Network rotation in November 2015 and no episodes premiered the following year, despite a season airing in some countries internationally and production of a second season of episodes underway.

## **New Looney Tunes**

In January 2017, it was revealed that amidst the fourth introduction was retitled "New Looney Tunes," dropping all references to the original title of "Wabbit - A Looney Tunes Production." A New Second Season that will focus in other characters like Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Tweety and other Looney Tunes and not just Bugs Bunny like in Season 1.

## **Company Info and Logo**

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. or Warner Bros. was the company in charge of the production of the 2011 version of Wabbit - A Looney Tunes Production. They also made the original Looney Tunes shorts, the 2011 reboot series, The Looney Tunes Show and was a setting in the 2003 movie,Looney Tunes: Back in Action. The logo appears briefly once the credits conclude.