Looney Tunes Returns To HBO Max... Without Guns

(CBN) - Looney Tunes Cartoons, the new series of animated shorts released exclusively on the HBO Max streaming service, will not be "doing guns," says series executive producer and showrunner Peter Browngardt. A throwback to the Looney Tunes cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s — bringing back classic pairings like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, Tweety and Sylvester, and Daffy Duck and Porky Pig — the zany cartoon violence depicted in Looney Tunes Cartoons will continue with anvils, dynamite, and other weapons as part of the 1,000-plus minutes of all-new animation taking a cartoonist-driven approach to its simple, gag-driven storytelling.

"We're not doing guns," Browngardt told The New York Times. "But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in."

I don't think this is the end of the world. Looney Tunes has put out thousands and thousands of hours of content with only a percentage even featuring guns in the first place. However, the characters predominantly featured with guns - Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam - are so tied to guns I'm unsure how they'd be able to stick around in this new iteration of Looney Tunes. Elmer Fudd is a literal hunter, I don't know if after all these years toting the chopper he's going to be able to transition into bow hunting. That's a man extremely stuck in his ways, often to his own detriment. Which is specifically why I really don't think it was necessary for Looney Tunes to remove guns from their talking bunny rabbit cartoon. 

Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and Wile E. Coyote are the big time weapon users in the Looney Tunes universe. Three absolute bozos. 0-for-Ever when it comes to triumph on the battlefield. Their failures so magnificent you could only laugh directly in their recently exploded faces. The point being Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, Daffy Duck, whoever they were matched up against would always win using their wit, outsmarting their better equipped, TNT-toting foils. Elmer Fudd puts a shotgun into Bugs Bunny's burrow and doesn't realize the barrel of the gun has gone through the hole, back out a strategically dug tunnel that now aims the very same shotgun at Fudd's own keister. Kablamo, brand new poop shoot for Elmer. In a cartoon designed for children it felt like a pretty strong message: strive to be the smarter person in a conflict as that's who prevails more often than not. I understand that we no longer live in the 1940s and that times change, but it feels like these lessons might be more important now than ever. Especially since they're keeping the rest of the artillery produced by ACME in the new shows. What's the logic behind keeping far more dangerous weapons involved? Sure, I may not be able to wrangle up an anvil on short notice. Hell, I may not fully know what an anvil is. But in all my years of watching cartoons I've never once wanted to emulate the idiot hunter who constantly got his pants pulled down by a wise-cracking rabbit. If anything it gave me extremely unreasonable expectations for the versatility of carrots.