Further evidence of our cultural decline.
Tue 22 Feb 2005
'Updating' Bugs Bunny and the gang is no laughing matter
How can Coyote battle gravity in space, where everyone floats?
LEE RANDALL
WATCH out world, I’m angry. Warner Brothers is messing with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, updating them for the 21st century. Is nothing sacred? Calling them Loonatics, as if they were escapees from Bedlam, these descendants of our familiar friends will rocket through space some 700 years in the future. Instead of their natural fur and feathers, they have been redrawn wearing hard-edged space costumes and now resemble Japanese robots.
Most appallingly, each has been given a crime-fighting superpower. Why? When did we stop believing that ordinary human traits such as intelligence, bravery, tenacity and loyalty comprised heroic virtues?
According to the president of Warner Brothers Animation, Sander Schwartz, "this is ... intended for kids [6-11 years old] who are growing up in the internet age, an age of technology, an age of hip, cool animation". Mister, go watch some reruns. Bugs and his gang are the dernier cri of cool. In 2002, readers of America’s TV Guide (with a circulation in the millions) voted Bugs Bunny the greatest cartoon character of all time. Not bad for a bunny invented before television itself. He beat Homer Simpson, Charlie Brown and Disney’s mouse, who limped in at number 19.
THE original animators had grand ambitions, and each film is a masterpiece of wit and sophistication appealing to young and old alike. Bugs came into his own in 1940, when Mel Blanc, inventing an accent that tortured the vowels of Brooklyn and The Bronx, first uttered the immortal words "What’s up, Doc?" Munching his carrot, Bugs planted his first juicy kiss on the lips of arch-enemy, Elmer Fudd. (If that’s not subversive, what is?)
Looney Tunes alerted kids like myself to a variety of cultural touchstones. To this day, hearing Strauss’s Blue Danube makes me picture the ever-extending hump of a rabbit burrow tunnelling across the landscape before Bugs pops free. In 1957, Bugs and Elmer starred in What’s Opera, Doc?, which presented Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle in seven minutes, and became the first animated short inducted into America’s National Film Registry. In another cartoon, Bugs spins the genre on its head, tormenting Daffy Duck by switching his backgrounds and props, messing up the soundtrack, even going so far as to erase and redraw him.
ACCORDING to reports, the new cartoons are "action-oriented, filled with chases and fights". But isn’t the entire substance of the Roadrunner/Wile E Coyote relationship an elaborate high-speed chase punctuated by explosions? What the hell more does it take to satisfy kids these days?
Worse still, the proposed modernisation must inevitably destroy the purity of premise behind Roadrunner cartoons, laid out in ten strict rules by the series creator, Chuck Jones: 1 Roadrunner cannot harm Coyote; 2 No outside force can harm Coyote, only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products; 3 Coyote could stop anytime, if he wasn’t a fanatic (as defined by Santayana: "one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim"); 4 No dialogue, ever, except "Beep! Beep!"; 5 Roadrunner must stay on the road; 6 All action is confined to the natural environment of the characters; 7 All tools and weapons must be obtained from the Acme Corporation; 8 Whenever possible, make gravity Coyote’s greatest enemy; 9 Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his adventures; 10 The audience’s sympathy must remain with Coyote.
Take these two out of the American desert and all hell breaks loose. How can Coyote battle gravity in space, where everyone floats? The first time he screeches off a cliff, he’ll merely waft away unharmed. What fun is that? How can Roadrunner embody perpetual motion if he’s going head-to-head with bad guys? Did nobody think this through? Is Warner Brothers so lazy - or creatively void - that it can’t invent new characters as compelling as the old?
A COLLEAGUE summed it up neatly: Bugs, Daffy and the rest are at once quintessentially timeless and of their time. In a decade, hard-nosed pre-pubescents will dismiss Loonatics as "so 2005". As for the originals, well, age shall not wither them. Warner Brothers, if you’re reading, take my advice: It ain’t broke. Stop trying to fix it.
thescotsman.scotsman.com |
