Looney Tunes remake will see Elmer Fudd without his rifle as creators declare 'we're not doing guns'
Elmer Fudd is still hunting wabbits, but now he hasn’t got a wifle.
The Looney Tunes cartoons have been remade for a modern audience, and Fudd is no longer allowed to have a gun.
Warner Bros has commissioned a new animation series featuring the classic characters, including Bugs Bunny, which sticks close to the spirit of the originals.
But viewers may notice a difference when it comes Fudd - whose catchphrase was: “Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.”
In response to US gun violence, the showrunners will not include firearms in Fudd’s arsenal. That is not to say that he has given up hunting Bugs Bunny, though - he just uses a scythe instead.
Sticks of dynamite, anvils on the head and booby traps will still feature in the series.
“We’re not doing guns,” said Peter Browngardt, executive producers of the series, in an interview with the New York Times. “But we can do cartoony violence - TNT, the Acme stuff.”
Explaining that the cartoons will otherwise stay true to the original, Browngardt said: “I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros had never stopped making Looney Tunes cartoons? As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
With the exception of the ban on guns, the cartoons are a throwback to a different time, he added. “We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, ‘everyone needs to be friends’, ‘everyone needs to get along’. Looney Tunes is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”
Looney Tunes shorts were launched in 1930 to run in cinemas before the main event started, and moved to television in 1960.
The new cartoons have launched in the US on the new streaming service HBO Max, and received more views than HBO favourites The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, according to reports.
Ranging from one to six minutes in length, they feature other famous characters from the franchise such as Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety and Yosemite Sam.
One of the writing team, Alex Kirwan, likened the process of reviving such a classic property as “writing new Beatles songs”.
