The Warner Bros. shield is one of the most instantly recognizable movie studio logos this side of Disney – and like Disney, for decades viewers would establish that familiarity as children, even if they weren’t actually watching movies. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts were in such heavy circulation for so long – in the 1990s, as multiple characters turned 50, they had an hour of Saturday mornings on ABC and daily half-hour airings on Nickelodeon – that almost any cartoon-watcher born within a half-century window might well associate that “WB” shield with its zoom forward, soundtracked by the opening wind-up to “The Merry-Go-Around Broke Down,” the Looney Tunes theme music. In some versions, Bugs Bunny himself would lounge atop the shield; for about a decade, the logo for Warner Bros. Family Entertainment featured Bugs in a tuxedo, leaning against the shield logo used for other Warner films; and even today, the logo for Warner Bros. Animation is clearly styled to imitate the old Looney Tunes version of that iconic WB shield.
True that these are all just corporate logos. But imagine for a moment if there was a movie or a TV series starring Mickey Mouse, or set in Sleeping Beauty’s castle, which serves as Disney’s logo – and that Disney shrugged and sold it off to Crackle. That’s essentially what’s happening with Warner Bros. and the property most closely associated with the studio for the better part of a century. The same week that a Looney Tunes movie debuted in theaters through an indie distributor rather than Warner Bros. Pictures, the company’s streaming service Max pulled the last remaining original Looney Tunes shorts, a collection that had already been inexplicably and selectively gutted. Some more contemporary, post-1990 material, including the recent six-season run of Looney Tunes Cartoons, remains on the service, but the reason those revivals exist – the classic Warner shorts of the 1940s and 1950s, in particular – are currently nowhere in sight.
Maybe, maybe Warners could be extended the benefit of the doubt regarding The Day the Earth Blew Up, the feature-length spinoff of Looney Tunes Cartoons that they didn’t wind up releasing themselves. The movie was originally intended to debut on Cartoon Network and Max, until Warners decided this didn’t fit their strategy (of what? Showing the shows they make?!) and shopped the movie around instead. While the decision to treat The Day the Earth Blew Up as a toxic property in need of unloading is akin to getting cold feet about airing a series finale to a five-season show – literally what is the financial risk if it’s already paid for and finished? – that disdain is ultimately why the movie became the first fully animated original Looney Tunes film to ever play in theaters.
Yes, that’s correct: Before 2025, there was never a fully animated Looney Tunes movie made up entirely of new footage. Compilation movies patching together bits of the old shorts with some new bridge material were a semi-regular theatrical fixture in the 1980s, and Warner made some bigger-budget attempts with the Space Jam movies and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, combining the characters with live-action stars. But the simple directive of “make a new 80-minute animated feature starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck” has never been followed. (Even now, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a feature starring Daffy and Porky Pig; the fact that it’s not a roll call of every Looney Tunes character ever drawn increases its focus as a comedy, but also tips to the fact that it wasn’t really intended as a major theatrical event.)
To be fair, Disney has never made a theatrical feature film starring Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, either. But as questionable and corporate as many of Disney’s decisions are, it’s nearly impossible to picture them pulling every Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoon made before 1990 from Disney+, not least because it doesn’t make sense as a business move: The shorts presumably can’t be licensed as easily to other streamers as a higher-profile feature could, and any short-term money that could be made from a deal like that wouldn’t be worth the branding confusion of having signature Disney characters pop up on the Roku Channel. This has been the case for ages; in the cable days, Disney was proud to make the Disney Channel the exclusive television home to much of its back catalog.
Warners has never fully abandoned the Looney Tunes characters; in fact, they always seem to be hinting at big plans to re-introduce the characters to a new generation. For example, just a few years ago they made Coyote vs. Acme, another live-action/animation hybrid, this one focusing on Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. The filmmakers seemed to love the experience; live-action co-star Will Forte has talked it up repeatedly, outside of any promotional cycle. Where is that movie now? Moldering in the Warner Bros. vault; CEO David Zaslav determined that it would be better to take a tax write-off on the movie than release it. (It was nominally offered to other studios to pick up and distribute, but at such a prohibitively high price that no one jumped at the chance.)
It’s possible that on a purely corporate level, Zaslav is correct that a Looney Tunes movie is not money in the bank. The Day the Earth Blew Up didn’t make much on its opening weekend, despite little competition (though it was also released by an indie distributor with little in the way of marketing). Even the cravenly IP-packed Space Jam: A New Legacy wasn’t a big hit in 2021 (though, in fairness, it was one of those Warner movies that came out on Max on the same day). Hell, the original Space Jam was a hit and became a major nostalgia generator, but back in 1996, there was definitely a sense that it could have done even better – maybe if it had been, say, good. (The same year, Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame actually outgrossed it.)
Still, doesn’t this all make the case for benign neglect, rather than intentional negation? If something as crappy as Space Jam could nonetheless build a following over the years, it shouldn’t be hard to do the same with genuine masterpieces of the animated-short form. Moreover: What possible purpose does pulling the old Looney Tunes shorts from Max serve, beyond self-fulfilling prophecy?
What’s strange about the Zaslav era is that Warners seems actively hostile toward these characters, angrily misinterpreting the artists’ intentions in hopes that this will somehow save the money. The nonsensical rationale for losing the shorts was that their current strategy emphasizes “adult and family programming,” the implication being the Looney Tunes shorts are “children’s programming.” Not only is this a confusing famly-but-not-children’s designation for a service that still runs something literally called Baby Looney Tunes, it runs in direct opposition to the cartoons’ whole deal as precursors to stuff like The Simpsons: Animation produced with the assumption that both kids and adults will enjoy it. And even if you believe with every fragment of your soul that Looney Tunes shorts have endured for over half a century because they are purely, entirely, and irrevocably for children, what possible cost is there to keeping a bunch of shorts that Warner Bros. already owns available on the streaming service that they also own? Is Max operating off a Google Cloud account reaching its limit? Tell Zaslav to maybe delete some of his email attachments and keep a piece of the cinema history that he supposedly reveres.
The real answer to these questions may be that because Looney Tunes exists outside of simple, understandable IP – where sentimentalized characters, hero’s-journey plotting, and expanded-universe spinoffs rule – it frustrates and confuses executives who have been trained to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room. The pleasures of Looney Tunes shorts have more to do with the dexterity and fluidity of the animation, the free-flowing silliness of the gags, and the steadfast nature of the characters’ comic hang-ups than hacky save-the-cat screenwriting principles. That’s something that The Day the Earth Blew Up largely understands, and if the film does sometimes feel more specifically kid-aimed than its classic ancestors, it also feels designed to acclimate those kids to an animation style that’s decidedly different from other big-studio features. Unfortunately, Warners doesn’t seem all that interested in participating in that kind of reclamation unless it can make them a better deal than tax write-offs. Here’s the thing: If they keep treating a major part of their studio history as shiftless layabouts, that Warner Bros. shield will mean even less in the future.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.