There's been much hubbub and hand wringing consternation among interweb wags about the "re-imagining" (new Hollywood speak for "remaking" or "insipid recycling") of Bugs and the rest of the Warner Brothers cartoon gang as the Loonatics. The story, if you don't know it by now, concerns a crackerjack group of superheroes doing battle with evildoers and other assorted nogoodniks in the far off year of 2772. These heroes are updated versions of the classic Warner Brothers' characters we've all grown up watching, but now drawn with sharper angles, meaner faces with bad-ass glares, and clad in black and flourescent colors. To wit, these characters are:
Buzz (Bugs Bunny): Team leader with laser and martial arts expertise
Duck (Daffy Duck): Weapons expert with built-in sonar
Roadster (Road Runner): Super speed
Spaz (Tasmanian Devil): Team muscle with jaws of steel
Lexi (Lola Bunny): Disguise expert with super hearing
Slick (Wile E. Coyote): Vehicles and surveillance; regeneration abilities
Disregarding whether or not Lola Bunny is a part of the Warners' canon, Loonatics doesn't seem especially egregious compared to other Warners' attempts to exploit and recycle their famous cartoon characters. Doesn't anyone remember Tiny Toons, Space Jam, Baby Looney Tunes or any of the crappy repackaging of old shorts linked by newly (and horribly) animated footage that came out in the early '80s? Certainly, Loonatics is an outrageous and cynical update, and yet another sign of a dearth of imagination in the major studios; but, really, is that anything new? True cartoonheads aren't probably going to watch the series, or if they're especially curious, give it a cursory look, and the series will probably fade without consequence into the fuzzy background of our consciousness. The victims of this bastardization are not so much the legacies of Chuck, Tex, Friz, and Bob, but as Amid from Cartoon Brew aptly put it, "...[the] countless modern creators out there who have ideas...who have something to say...and it's a slap in the face of every talented artist working in this business whenever a major animation studio chickens out like this. Shoving a tired rabbit down America's throat for the umpteenth time will never reap WB the rewards of giving America a great new cartoon star, an honestly-created cartoon that speaks to our time and place..."
Well said. If you're curious on how Loonatics is going to look, here's a Quicktime preview.
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