Looney Tunes is a Warner Brothers animated cartoon series which ran in many movie theatres from 1930 to 1969. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and is Warner Bros. Animation's first animated theatrical series. The regular Warner Bros. animation cast also became known as the "Looney Tunes" (often misspelled, intentionally or not, as "Looney Toons").

In 1930, Warner Bros. became interested in developing a series of musical animated shorts in order to promote their music. They had recently acquired the ownership of Brunswick Records along with four music publishers for US $28 million. Consequently, they were eager to start promoting this material in order to cash in on the sales of sheet music and phonograph records.

Warners made a deal with Leon Schlesinger to produce cartoons for Warner Bros. Schlesinger hired Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman to produce their first series of cartoons. Bosko was Looney Tunes first major star, debuting in the short Sinkin' in the Bathtub in 1930. When Harman and Ising left the Warner Bros. in 1933 over a budget dispute with Schlesinger, they took with them all the rights of the characters and cartoons which they had created.

Schlesinger had to negotiate with them in order to keep the rights to the name Looney Tunes as well as for the right to use the slogan That's All Folks! at the end of the cartoons.

The name Looney Tunes is a variation on Silly Symphonies, the name of Walt Disney's concurrent series of music-based cartoon shorts.

History

In the beginning years, both Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies drew their storylines from Warner's vast music library. However, eventually the two series distinguished themselves by Looney Tunes becoming the umbrella for the studio's various recurring characters, while Merrie Melodies continued with the use of one-shot characters. Also, from 1934 to 1943 Merrie Melodies were produced in color and Looney Tunes in black and white; after 1943, however, both series were produced in color; the only real difference between the two series was in the variation between the opening theme music and titles. Both series by this time also made use of the various Warner Bros. cartoon characters. By 1943, the theme music for Looney Tunes was "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin; the theme music for Merrie Melodies was an adaptation of "Merrily We Roll Along" by Charles Tobias, Murray Mencher and Eddie Cantor. The reason for Looney Tunes' changeover to color was Warner Bros' decision to re-release only the color Merrie Melodies for their Blue Ribbon Classics series of cartoons, noted by the special "Blue Ribbon" title card.

The Looney Tunes series' popularity was strengthened even more when the shorts began airing on network and syndicated television in the mid-to-late 1950s under various titles and formats. However, since the syndicated shorts' target audience was children and because of concerns over children's television in the 1970s, the Looney Tunes shorts began to be edited to remove scenes featuring innuendos, racial remarks, curse words, ethnic stereotypes and extreme violence.

In 1976, Looney Tunes characters made their way into the amusement business when they became the mascots for the two Marriott's Great America theme parks (Gurnee, Santa Clara). After the Gurnee park was sold to Six Flags, they also claimed the rights to use the characters at the other Six Flags parks, and continue to do so to this day.

In 1988, a number of Looney Tunes characters appeared in numerous cameo roles in Who Framed Roger Rabbit; the more notable cameos featured Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester, and Tweety. This is notable because this is the only time in which any Looney Tunes characters have shared any screen time with their rivals at Disney - particularly in the scenes where Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse are skydiving, and when Daffy Duck and Donald Duck are performing their now-famous "Duelling Pianos" sequence.


Since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Looney Tunes characters have been featured in numerous video games, such as a same-titled one that came out on Game Boy in 1992. It was later remade for the Game Boy Color in 1999; it was not a best seller and received bad reviews.

Looney Tunes characters have had more success in the area of television, with appearances in several originally produced series, including 1991's Taz-Mania (starring The Tasmanian Devil), 1995's The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries (starring Sylvester the cat, Tweety Bird and Granny), 2002's Baby Looney Tunes (which had a similar premise to Muppet Babies), and 2003's Duck Dodgers (starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig). The Looney Tunes characters also made frequent cameos in the 1990 spinoff series Tiny Toon Adventures, where they played teachers and mentors to a younger generation of cartoon characters, plus occasional cameos in the later shows Animaniacs and Histeria! Most recently, Loonatics Unleashed, a futuristic version of the characters, is currently airing on Kids' WB! It has a large fanbase, although the show was greeted with negative criticism from audiences familiar with the original versions of the characters.

Although the cartoons are now seldom seen on mainstream TV, thanks to revival theatrical screenings, and the Golden Collection DVD box sets, Looney Tunes and its characters have remained a part of Western animation heritage.

In Spring 2008, Looney Tunes will be at "T Works" Website.


Colorization

In 1967, the then-Warner Bros.-Seven Arts company reissued all the black-and-white Looney Tunes in a primitive colorization process. The original prints were sent to South Korea where artists re-traced each cartoon frame-by-frame in color.

These cartoons continued to be seen over the decades, and even some of the hand-colored cartoons ended up on low-budget bargain-bin home video labels (the hand-colored versions were themselves copyrighted, but it has been suggested they too have fallen into the public domain).

Then, in 1990, 1992 & 1995 Warner Bros. re-did the classic black-and-white shorts yet again in color, but this time using a digital colorization process rather than re-coloring them frame-by-frame as in 1967. The digital color versions have aired on the Turner networks (Cartoon Network and Boomerang except on the programming block Late Night Black And White). Incidentally, the 1967 hand-drawn color versions continue to be seen on the Turner networks to this day.