In the imaginative firmament of my childhood, the Looney Tunes were a radiant constellation, and no star shone brighter than the Tasmanian Devil. Jaime Weinman, in his book “Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes,†describes Taz, as he was called in the 1990s, as “an ugly, slobbering beast,†who, Weinman notes, “only appeared in five cartoons but somehow became one of the studio’s most popular characters in the 1980s and 1990s, even getting his own TV show for a while.†Weinman seems a little bewildered by Taz’s late-life ascent to animated superstardom. But, for a slightly younger generation of “Looney Tunes†fans, it was the Tasmanian Devil, more so than Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, who was the G.O.A.T.
This is one of the fascinating things about a franchise that has endured so long: it’s shifted and expanded, with even cameo roles becoming marquee stars. The short-lived Taz series was “Taz-Mania,†which ran on the Fox Network from 1991 until 1995. Weinman touches on “Taz-Mania,†and he assesses it, with characteristic generosity, as “often funny, although very talky,†featuring a Taz who, despite the drastic changes in style and setting, is nevertheless “recognizable as the same character from the Bob McKimson cartoons†in which he got his start.
One of Weinman’s strengths as a historian and critic is his insistence on approaching different eras and manifestations of “Looney Tunes†on their own terms. Though he justly accords the pre-1964 “Looney Tunes†golden age special attention and reverence, he refuses to dismiss their later appearances out of hand. “The fair question to ask,†he writes, “is not whether a new cartoon measures up to some past masterpiece, but whether it is entertaining and funny on its own.â€
Of course, it’s precisely those past masterpieces that are the heart of this cartoon’s long-standing appeal. A central argument of “Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite†is that “Looney Tunes†has continued to endure for so many decades both because of the extremely high quality of its strongest films and because of the unique historical and commercial conditions that allowed those films to remain available to audiences and in the spotlight for such a long time.
While many of us grew up watching “Looney Tunes†on television, the Looney Tunes pictures we remember fondly were originally created for the big screen, as the brief cartoons that accompanied newsreels and other short subjects before a theatrical feature. Part of the reason “Looney Tunes†always looked — and often still look — so much better than other Saturday morning cartoons is that they were more expensive, more lavishly animated, and realized on a more extravagant scale than the modern stuff created expressly for television, even if they were made upwards of half a century earlier.
But besides their sheer technical virtuosity, what is it about the content of these thousand-odd classic cartoons that has allowed them to endure — not simply as historical artifacts, but as the wildly entertaining family entertainments that continue to charm audiences to this day? Weinman believes the original “Looney Tunes†pictures represent “the greatest achievement of American film comedy in the sound era.†(To me, that would be the films of Preston Sturges, but Weinman’s is hardly an outrageous or untenable claim.) Weinman applies a scholarly seriousness and painstaking rigour to the mechanics of seven-minute cartoons, and comes close to answering that question.
It’s an old rule of comedy that to explain a joke is to ruin it. But Weinman’s attentive deep readings enhance one’s appreciation of cartoons most people love in a more intuitive way. He crystallizes the significance of a hunt or a chase in a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon: it’s “a story for a film that doesn’t have a story.†He clarifies the conventions and formulas that undergird these films, and those elements that individualize them. He is really, really good at striking the heart of what makes a character or a gag funny, even when it comes to something as ineffable as comic timing or a flourish of animation. He understands how these cartoons work, and reading this book, you come to understand them better.
Of course, what is funny in the minds of audiences has changed. Cartoons that were made more than half a century ago inevitably circulated the great many stereotypes, caricatures, and loaded clichés that appeared repeatedly in Hollywood entertainment at the time, especially in the pre-war period. The owners of the franchise as well as those who enjoy the cartoons have grappled with the question of just what do with those jokes. Weinman devotes an entire chapter to what are referred to as the “Censored Eleven,†a selection of eleven cartoons that Warner Bros. eliminated from the “Looney Tunes†library after concluding that “racist stereotypes were so completely central to the story that no amount of editing could save them.â€
There were also other, subtler ways in which, as he writes, “the minstrel-show tradition looms so large in U.S. entertainment that many things in animation trace back to it.†His analysis of racism in “Looney Tunes†has nuance. While he is unsparing in his criticisms of the most overtly repugnant of the 11, such as “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips†and the blatantly anti-Black “Angel Puss,†he is careful to observe that “the technically good work can’t always be neatly separated from the morally bad work.â€
Consider, for instance, the care and attention that director Bob Clampett put into “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs.†Weinman does, and despite its technical merit, he ultimately declines to “make the leap from enjoying it to absolving it.†While he observes that racist depictions declined over time, he is admirably clear about the true motivations: “The acceptable limits of stereotyping in Hollywood are defined by who the creators and producers and willing to listen to, and whose pressure they fear … And nothing makes them listen like fear of losing money.â€
Although vintage “Looney Tunes†cartoons were edited, and in some cases censored, it was for the most part all those same classics, made before the studio shuttered in the late 1960s, that continued to be broadcast for children through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. When Warner Bros. made a concerted effort to generate new interest in their beloved property with new original content, Bugs Bunny and company jumped the shark. While the work of minted golden-age directors like Tex Avery and Friz Freleng has retained the touch of bona fide genius for diehard fans, there is a feeling that later “Looney Tunes†just utterly and completely stinks.
Weinman, to his credit, avoids lining up with the fanatics, and he makes a consistent effort to find some value even in “Tunes†material that plainly isn’t to his taste. He has some trouble concealing his animosity for “Space Jam,†which he characterizes as first and foremost a Michael Jordan film and an attempt “to revitalize a brand and sell a lot of merchandise,†though he stops short of outright trashing it. Bizarrely, he seems to assume children at the time wouldn’t have known who the Looney Tunes were.
“Even kids who enjoyed the movie,†he writes, “didn’t really know who these talking animals were, or what they did.†Huh? I was 10 years old when “Space Jam†was released, and I knew who the Looney Tunes were. Like many kids my age, I had two obsessions: the Looney Tunes, and Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
It may be true that by the 1990s, vintage “Looney Tunes†reruns were no longer experiencing the kind of full-scale renaissance they enjoyed in the ’70s and ’80s. But this was the era of “Tiny Toons,†of “Taz-Mania,†and of a metric ton of “Toonsâ€-themed video games.
My childhood love of all things Taz reinforces Weinman’s point about the “Looney Tunes†and their undiminished persistence. “Looney Tunes†persisted for different audiences in ways that weren’t quite the same. The gags may have changed, but Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and even ancillary heroes like Taz and Marvin the Martian continue to find their way into the imaginations of kids everywhere. In whatever form, however watered down, that’s unlikely to change.
Correction — Nov. 29, 2021: Daffy Duck was a character on “Looney Tunes.†A previous version of this article referred to the character Donald Duck, a Disney character.
Calum Marsh is a reporter and critic based in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½.
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