Elmer Fudd Will No Longer Have a Rifle in New ‘Looney Tunes’ Cartoons on HBO Max

Do you remember the old “Looney Tunes” cartoons? Stars like Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird and Elmer Fudd may have been around longer than you realized.

“Looney Tunes” was originally a series of shorts intended to be watched before a movie at a theater. Moviegoers were first introduced to the characters back in the 1940s. Then, in the 1960s, the pranks, fun and, well, violence, was transferred to the small screen.

Depending on your age, you may remember watching these classic cartoons when they originally aired, or perhaps you caught reruns decades later. You may remember more modern iterations of the “Looney Tunes” stars from movies like “Space Jam” or TV series like “The Looney Tunes Show.”

Now, the classic cartoon is making a comeback on streaming service HBO Max. The plan is to create a total of 1000 minutes of new Looney Tunes adventures. The new series, which is called “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” will be a series of shorts in the same vein as the shorts that were created in the 1940s. They will range from 1 to 6 minutes in length, and there will be about 200 of them once they are all complete.

You can get a taste of the first of these new Looney Tunes by watching the video below.

It looks a lot like the original cartoons, doesn’t it? If you’re not familiar with the characters, you may be a little caught off guard by the violence. That is a lot of dynamite, but the creators of the new show have actually toned down the violence a bit. If you are familiar with the classic show, you may notice something that was missing – Elmer Fudd’s rifle.

Executive producer Peter Browngardt told the New York Times, “We’re not doing guns, but we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.”

There won’t be any guns used in the new shorts. No rifle for Elmer Fudd. No pistol for Yosemite Sam.

While the cartoons are new, they don’t necessarily feel like other shows that are created today. They feel old-fashioned, and that was the goal. Browngardt explained, “I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros. had never stopped making ‘Looney Tunes’ cartoons? As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”

Storyboard artist Ryan Khatam told the New York Times, “We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along. ‘Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”

Violent yes, but without guns. Do you think the absence of guns makes a difference in the show? Do you think it’s too violent for little kids to watch? Will you be watching the new shorts?