A modern reboot of the classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons on the new streaming service HBO Max will feature all of the Acme fun but none of the gun violence, according to a new report.
“We’re not doing guns,” Peter Browngardt, the series’ executive producer and showrunner, told The New York Times. “But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.”
Viewers can look forward to seeing the classic toon weapons like dynamite and booby traps, but gone are Elmer Fudd’s shotgun and Yosemite Sam’s revolvers, according to the report.
In the new series, Fudd is seen carrying a scythe to hunt Bugs Bunny.
“I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros. had never stopped making “Looney Tunes” cartoons?’” Mr. Browngardt said. “As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
The crew is still trying to figure out how to reintroduce certain Looney Tunes characters in respect to the changing times.
“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” comics artist Johnny Ryan, who worked on the show, told The Times.
“‘Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that,” he added. “It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”