Looney Tunes Cartoons series will not see Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam or any other character carying a gun.
Elmer Fudd has many means for cartoony violence and mayhem in HBO Max’s “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” the reboot of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, and the infamous rabbit hunter will not be blasting his cartoon rifle.
In an interview with The New York Times, showrunner Peter Browngardt confirmed that the team behind the new animated series made an active decision to scrub the toon team of their firearms for the rebooted series.
Looney Tunes Cartoons Official Trailer
“We’re not doing guns,” Peter Browngardt said. ”But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.” He continued.
Elmer Fudd comes at Bugs Bunny with a deadly scythe in a short clip “Dynamite Dance”. The character appeared without his signature rifle. In the scene, He launched an attack, then it stopped as the hare jams a stick of lit synamite into Elmer’s mouth. The two character proceed to rollick back and forth through a slapstick-driven sequence of classically orchestrated chaos.
“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.”
Johnny Ryan, a comics artist who was hired as the story editor for the new series, further added that the team tried to maintain the spirit of the original show throughout production. At the same time reflecting modern sensibilities in the show’s simple, gag-driven, and visually vibrant stories.
“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” Ryan explained. “Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”