The Twenty-First Century Can Ruin Anything, Part MCMXVI

Thanks to an ad on Facebook, I have now seen one of the new "Looney Tunes" cartoons produced by Warner Bros. As you may have read, Elmer Fudd was divested of his shotgun in the interests of reducing gun violence in the United States. Below is a screen grab of Elmer after he has attempted to split Bugs Bunny's head with a gigantic axe in the short "Hole Lotta Trouble:"

Clearly the studio has made an important statement about the role firearms play in making our society unsafe.

Over the course of the cartoon, Bugs tricks Elmer into reaching his hand into a box of scorpions, who sting it so much it is impossible to withdraw from the rabbit hole entrance. After a couple of sight gags -- Bugs "milks" Elmer's now udder-like hand, causing him to completely deflate and then reinflates him by blowing into the hand -- the wascally wabbit paints the pathetic hunter's now ginormous floating rear end with a heavily-made up lady bear face, which draws an amorous male bear to appreciatively leer at it. Before we can do more than shudder at where a cartoon on HBO might take that narrative line, the bear hugs Elmer so hard his inflated hindquarters explode, freeing his trapped hand but shooting him so far in the air that when he returns to Earth his head is now stuck underneath the ground. Bugs then coats the hapless hunter's abused hindquarters with glue, attaches a lit stick of dynamite and then drags the soon-to-explode section of Elmer's body around the edge of the screen and underground, where he knots it to Elmer's bugging eyes until the dynamite explodes and Elmer falls through the hole to the bottom of the rabbit warren, his pants shredded and his bare reddened tuckus on display. At that point voice actor Eric Bauza utters Bugs' only words in the short, "Now that's what I call a bare bottom!" 

Almost none of the comments below the ad that I read -- about 20 of the more than 600 at the time -- rated the short as anything other than awful. A couple talked about the way that this new cartoon dishonored the original Bugs and Elmer characters. That, of course, is silly, since they were just animated characters. "Hole Lotta Trouble" doesn't dishonor them. Should Chuck Jones, Friz Freling, Mel Blanc and several other pioneers of the real Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons ever rise from the grave, though, there are a number of current Warner Bros. employees who should start running.