By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Bunny Back
It’s nice to see WB trying yet again to revive Looney Tunes.
The only hole in Brooks Barnes’ story, as best I can tell, is that he didn’t know about the five (if it was a different number, please correct me, oh geeks of lore) shorts that WB commissioned and completed around the time of Osmosis Jones laying an egg in 2001. The shorts were tested… and universally disliked, apparently.
The really hard thing is that you can’t just role out the old characters. You need someone with a strong voice who can do what the guys who first did Looney Tunes did… bring their own thing to the party. Just as Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson and Friz Freleng and Tex Avery each did something different with some of the same characters.
The greatest classic revival I’ve seen is John K’s Mighty Mouse. But even if you just look at what Matt Groenig and company have done with the sitcom… and then, look at where Seth MacFarlane took it. It’s not that the foundation is so unique… it’s the perspective (combined with a great deal of talent).
Shouldn’t Todd Graff, writer/director of Camp, get a check for every episode of Glee that airs? And while we’re at it, send a few bucks to Michael Meyer, who directed Spring Awakening and not only made musical theater cool for teens again, but splayed Lea Michele out on the stage naked to hit those high notes with Jonathan Groff (not Graff). Or do we just award the prize to Kenny Ortega and Peter Barsocchini for doing High School Musical.
And every one of those shows… different voices because different, completely committed people did the work. They weren’t just looking to revive something. (Broadway’s biggest kink in recent years was revivals directed by the original director… like you were seeing it in the 50s. Bad idea. Meanwhile, the greatest successes in revivals have, for the most part, been about finding new voices… usually with a British accent.)
So I wish them luck, I would love my son to watch as many hours of Looney Tunes as I did growing up. And he will… even if this revival fails utterly. The oldies are still pretty sensational.
Joe Dante nailed it with LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION, but Warners botched the release so completely that the film itself now has the thoroughly unwarranted rep of being a stinker.
Cadavra: Agreed. I avoided seeing Back In Action for a long time because of its reputation (and because of how Space Jam botched the characters). When I finally caught up with it earlier this year, I was pleasantly surprised. While no masterpiece, that movie completely *got* the characters and did some pretty funny stuff with them.
But the message from the box office was that doing the Looney Tunes right doesn’t make money. So we’re presumably going to continue to get weird, painful corruptions of them indefinitely.
Fortunately, Warner is still respecting the classic cartoons. Four more DVDs of newly restored shorts coming later this year.
It should have been obvious to anyone with a brain that the problems LT:BIA had weren’t to do with the animated characters, but the live-action ones.
“…look at what Matt Groenig and company have done with the sitcom… and then, look at where Seth MacFarlane took it”
What, backwards away from smart, emotional storytelling and into pure, meaningless post-modern referentiality?
This ain’t about artistry. It’s all about Breathless Hype! Corporate Synergy! Hard Sell! Product Tie-Ins!
Sure as hell beats trying to film anything original that people will want to see.
Ironic that Chucky is complaining about originality.
Chucky, I agree it’s not about artistry, but come on, do you honestly think this is a case of breathless hype? Clearly this is a classic case of product flow.