Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite

Jaime Weinman, in his book Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite:  The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes (Sutherland House, 2021) takes a deep dive into the legendary and wildly popular Warner Brothers cartoons created between 1930 and 1963 featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, and the irrepressible Foghorn Leghorn among a host of others.  The cartoons were created to be the hors d’oeuvre to the main course of whatever Warner Brothers picture was scheduled at the local movie theater, but most of us of a certain age remember Bugs and company from Saturday mornings on one of the big three networks back in the day.

I have some specific memories of these beloved cartoons.  While my mother slept in, I would take some money from her purse and bike to the local Alta Dena bakery for a dozen chocolate and a dozen powdered donuts.  While my siblings and I munched away, we watched the Road Runner continually outwit Wile E. Coyote, leaving him smashed, bashed, and broken.  We watched while Bugs dressed as a woman to seduce the rather thick Elmer Fudd and send him off to hunt Daffy instead of Bugs, thoroughly convinced it was duck season instead of “wabbit” season.  No Beanie and Cecil for me, and Scooby Doo’s stoner act got old quickly.  Bugs Bunny, the trickster extraordinaire, never seemed tired.  Considering we were watching cartoons created in the 1940s and 1950s, our interest never waned even as we watched from the far future of the late 1960s and 70s.

Looney Tunes could be violent, and the popular characters rarely faced consequences for their actions, but we loved them.  Weinman theorizes that kids did not always connect with Looney Tunes characters “because we know that nothing has consequences for them, and they seem to know it too.”  I admired Bugs’ facility with words, his ability to con Porky or Elmer or Daffy, and always come out on top.  Rarely is he flustered or thrown off his game.  Weinman believes the cartoons adopted an “anything for a laugh” philosophy, which “isn’t what we expect of first-rate art.”  Is a cartoon first-rate art?  Arguably, yes!

Weinman goes on to write that “To celebrate the greatness of works of art, you have to acknowledge their limitations, the sides of the world that they don’t or can’t see.  Looney Tunes cartoons leave out a lot of human experience, and speak to only one kind of mood.  But what we ask of art is not that it tell us everything, but that it tell us something, that it have a style and a viewpoint that makes sense to us.  Every good Looney Tunes cartoon has that.”

The book offers a deep and well-researched history of the cartoons, along with how characters were perceived by the public, which ones became popular, and which ones were eventually phased out.  There were also several instances in their long history that characters were subtly, or even dramatically altered when different animation teams and producers took over.  Many of the most successful characters had speech impediments exploited for humor, something in our more careful age would not fly.  But these “vocal quirks” endeared them to audiences over generations.  It is also interesting to note which characters the studio thought would be the breakout stars.  For instance, they placed their faith in Daffy Duck as the definitive Looney Tunes cartoon character.  Of course, Bugs Bunny changed that.  The cartoons also attacked common themes in the culture, like hunting as a sign of manliness.  Porky Pig destroyed that fanciful notion, as did Elmer Fudd in his hunting cap, chasing both Bugs and Daffy with disastrous results.  However, Weinman points out that what makes Looney Tunes great is the ability of the writers and artists “to portray the maximum amount of comedy violence while still being charming, fun, family entertainment.”

Of course, the cartoons were produced during some of the most fraught times in the twentieth century, and they often reflected those crises specifically or tangentially.  When the cartoons were combined into packages and sold into syndication, several were removed for their overt racism.  They were singled out for their racist stereotypes and black-face gags, wholly inappropriate today and in the late 1960s and 1970s when they were a major block of Saturday morning programming for kids.

So what happened to Bugs and the gang?  Well, the syndication packages were divided and reassembled and then redivided again.  Many are available on YouTube.  Check your local listings, as the saying goes.  The characters did return to prominence in the Space Jam movies, the most successful project for Looney Tunes since the original Warner Brothers cartoon studio shut down.

If you are a fan of the cartoons, Jaime Weinman’s book is a must-have.  For the casual cartoon connoisseur, or someone who remembers the taste of chocolate and powdered donuts on a Saturday morning along with the telescoping concentric circles receding into the distance with “That’s all Folks!” that marked the end of each cartoon, this is an insightful and interesting book, as much about childhood and memory as American culture and a rabbit, who despite the odds, always came out on top, the trickster heading off into the sunset, on top of the world.