Animation webloggers are reacting with varying amounts of horror today over a press report that Warner Brothers Animation is prepping updated (like, into the future) versions of Bugs, Daffy and other classic characters. The goal here is a new franchise that takes the old, beloved players and styles them in some cutting-edge manner that will appeal to a new, younger audience. There will tentatively be a TV show called Loonatics, accompanied by a whole line of merchandising…and some folks are reacting as if it's all the greatest sin of blasphemy since someone first heckled the Holy Ghost.
I yield to no one in my reverence for the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and the men who made them, but it may be too early for talk of petitions, boycotts and nuking the Time-Warner building. First off, though some of the news reports are playing this as a "new displaces the old" move, that is clearly not the case. The original, true Bugs and Friends will be no less available than before, and I can't imagine the high-tech models usurping their place in history. The new cartoons would have to be pretty damn wonderful to make a dent in that.
This is just another repurposing from the marketing principles that brought you The Muppet Babies and Disney Babies and Yo, Yogi! and that show with a Batman in the future and, of course, Baby Looney Tunes, the new Duck Dodgers show and even Tiny Toon Adventures. When you have a successful property or group of properties and you've merchandised it to the max, the next step is to find a way to repackage it into something new — but not so new that it loses the heat of the established material. Some of those shows or campaigns were pretty good, some perhaps less than good…but in no way did they destroy or dislodge the underlying classics.
Secondly — and lastly, for now — I'm always uneasy when I see a new show or movie being condemned when it hasn't even been written yet. In articles like this one, we see that — and I quote: "Names for the new characters haven't been finalized, but they are likely to be derived from the originals: Buzz Bunny, for example." In other words, it's real early in the development process. Very little has been done and its unlikely than any of that is set in lucite. I can understand the temptation to leap to say something's a hopeless idea. I've done it myself at times, and it's not impossible that WB is announcing the project at such an early stage in order to gauge reaction. Still, there ought to be more than two daubs of green on the canvas before you say the painting stinks. If it eventually does, there will be plenty of time to say that later, after it actually exists.
I may have mentioned this before but many years ago, around the time I started edging into the TV business, I attended a lecture by a very accomplished, successful producer…a man with many prestigious credits. He told us that we had to recognize and avoid what he called "The Marley Ideas" — notions so dreadful that they were dead from the moment of conception. As an example, he told us that one TV network was then considering an idea so terrible, so guaranteed to fail, that everyone involved with it should be immediately fired for programming malpractice. And the way he described it, it sure sounded like you'd be an idiot to think that they could make a weekly series out of the movie, M*A*S*H.