Looney Tunes

Looney Tunes is Warner Brothers' popular animated series. In 1929, as a tool to promote the music of recently acquired Brunswick Records, Warner Brothers developed a series of animated shorts set to music. Warner Brothers hired Leon Schlesinger, Rudolph Ising, and Hugh Harmon to produce these cartoons, which were dubbed Looney Tunes as a play on Disney’s popular music-based cartoon Silly Symphonies. The first character to grace the Looney Tunes stage was Bosko, The Talk-Ink Kid. Unfortunately, when Harmon and Ising left Warner Bros. in 1933, they took the rights to Bosko with them. Luckily, this setback did not hinder the series' progress. Looney Tunes ran in theaters from 1929 to 1970 and continued to develop a cast of lovable characters. The smart-alec Bugs Bunny, the lisping Daffy Duck, and the stuttering Porky Pig are just some of the famous characters to emerge from the endearing cartoon series.

The popularity of Looney Tunes grew when the series began airing on network television in the 1950s. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Warner Bros. also made several feature films and television specials, mostly starring Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, including the 1996 feature Space Jam.

Though the cartoons are rarely seen on TV today (since Nickelodeon stopped airing the shorts in 1999), the Looney Tunes characters and their endearing mannerisms have left a permanent mark on American culture.