Room Temperature Take: The Looney Tunes Show is just a knockoff of the wackier Scully-Era of the Simpsons but with the Looney Tunes cast. It's not a bad show, but it's not particularly great and I don't get why everyone now is hailing it as some underrated masterpiece.
I told a friend of mine this who really loves The Looney Tunes show that you said this and it made him very upset. He linked me this video in protest.
For what it’s worth, I never watched tons and tons of Looney Tunes Show (an ongoing theme: I don’t watch much TV) but the premise did turn me off until I gave it a chance. As it turns out, “what if it was a modern animated sitcom?” is actually a really good venue for The Looney Tunes as characters.
Because, like, let’s face it. It’s 2018. The context those old Looney Tunes shorts existed in is 60 or 70 years ago. They’re timeless, sure, because they made them work – but really, they’re just full of modern-time pop culture references that were just broad enough to work regardless of the era.
Like, Bugs Bunny was created from influences like Groucho Marx and Clark Gable. Even I barely know who those guys are.
Nobody will ever make Looney Tunes like that anymore. Even Warner Brothers eventually stopped – we remember classics, but there’s dozens and dozens of low-budget Looney Tunes cartoons from the 60′s and 70′s that just aren’t very funny or well animated.
Even when Warner has tried to pay tribute to the classic Looney Tunes shorts, they feel too self-referential to what’s come before. It’s hard to create something new when you’re so married to something that nobody in modern times is equipped to accurately portray anymore.
This is literally just a worse version of “What’s Opera, Doc?” or “The Rabbit of Seville” but with Daffy Duck. The visual detail is amazing, and it’s crazy to think they massaged CGI to look like this, but beyond marveling at the graphics, there’s nothing here but a retread of a lot of ideas they already did to death.
The Looney Tunes show was a new place for these characters to go, and everything I have seen was been pretty good.
Not everything hits, and sometimes the show feels less like The Looney Tunes Show and more like The Daffy Duck show, but it’s still pretty good.
