Looney Tunes began as ads for Warner’s music catalog
Before Bugs Bunny ruled theaters, Warner Bros. wanted cartoons that sold sheet music. In 1929, after buying Brunswick Records and publishers for twenty-eight million dollars, the studio hired Leon Schlesinger. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were named to echo Disney’s Silly Symphonies—and to push the new song library.
Theatrical shorts ran mainly from 1930 to 1969 beside sister series Merrie Melodies, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons in animation’s golden age. Later revivals brought new shorts into theaters as recently as 2014. The roster grew to include Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and many others; Bugs became a Warner mascot with a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.
Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising worked with Schlesinger from 1930 to 1933; Schlesinger then ran production until selling the studio to Warner in 1944. The series opener in 1930 twisted a then-popular bathtub song title into a watery pun for its debut cartoon. Merrie Melodies were already in color from 1934, while Looney Tunes stayed black-and-white until switching between 1942 and 1943 after Bugs’s rise; afterward the two series were almost interchangeable.
From 1942 to 1964 they were the most popular animated shorts in movie theaters. When Harman and Ising left in 1933 over a budget fight, they took their characters; Schlesinger’s stopgap star Buddy, often with Cookie and dog Towser, headlined twenty-three shorts from 1933 to 1935 and is widely remembered as a dud.
A franchise built to move phonograph records became one of media’s highest-grossing brands—proof that a marketing brief can accidentally invent a mythology. What began as a music-promotion scheme beside Merrie Melodies became a theater-dominating short-film brand from the early 1940s through 1964, then a sprawling franchise of television, features, comics, games and park rides with Bugs as its public face.
Source: Looney Tunes
