HBO Max’s Great Looney Tunes Purge

[DGUtley]

HBO Max’s Great Looney Tunes Purge

Hundreds of classic cartoons vanished without warning. How can you raise your kids on favorites you can’t access anymore?

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When my son was 2 years old and new to screens, we discovered that what he liked to watch the most was Blippi, a hatefully lazy YouTube show in which a reformed but still unshaven video prankster misexplains physics and biology while operating heavy machinery and wandering unaccompanied around children’s museums. Desperate to find something we could both watch without one of us throwing a tantrum, I tried to track down some of my favorite old Looney Tunes shorts online, but that proved harder than you might think: Many aren’t available on YouTube, and there’s no way to search for individual cartoons on Amazon and iTunes. So I bought the first volume of the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection on Blu-ray and put on “The Rabbit of Seville,” the 1950 Chuck Jones cartoon in which, among other delights, Bugs Bunny massages Elmer Fudd’s scalp with his feet. My kid danced—actually danced—through the whole thing. That three-disc set and its two successors played on repeat in our home until a couple of years later, when we got HBO Max and discovered that not just the 50 most interesting but also about half of the 1,041 cartoons in the Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes filmography were available to watch, all in high definition. My fancy Blu-rays began gathering dust.


On Dec. 31, HBO Max, now under the thumb of profit-conscious Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, removed “The Rabbit of Seville” from the streaming platform, along with several hundred other Looney Tunes shorts produced after 1949. Warner Animation and HBO Max are both subsidiaries of Warner Bros.’ new owner, but under the complicated terms of Discovery’s acquisition, its status as a new entity allows it to leave some of its losses off its 2022 earnings reports. If that meant laying off staff, torching films that had already been shot and edited, shutting down an entire streaming service, and amputating half of the Warner Bros. library of historic cartoons, so be it. (My former Variety colleague Joe Adalian has a good breakdown of the process here.)


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HBO Max removed hundreds of classic Looney Tunes without warning. (slate.com)

[stjames1_53]

[OLD GUY IN FLORIDA]

When a child the cartoons were my favorite part of going to the movies.

https://vimeo.com/456078993

Do you have any idea of how much classical music kids were exposed to because of these cartoons.

[RMNIXON]

It's a sad fact the the current generation of young people thinks anything not made this century is already old!

Even the Hollywood remakes are like new film ideas to them.

[Standing Wolf]

It's a sad fact the the current generation of young people thinks anything not made this century is already old!

Even the Hollywood remakes are like new film ideas to them.

Thus it has always been, and sometimes it's hilarious. In 1988 young teeny-bopper singer Tiffany recorded a cover of the Beatles' 'I Saw Her Standing There', and a reporter overheard some teen girls talking about a song - the original - playing on the radio, and one of them said, "Hey, some boys are doing Tiffany's song".

Then you have the kids declaring that the latest popular movie - whether it's Avatar or Titanic - is "the greatest film ever made".

At least this Looney Tunes business appears to be some kind of cost-cutting situation and not another eruption of Mount Wokeness.