No More Guns For Looney Tunes Characters

Classic characters Elmer Fudd, who was always hunting duck or "wabbit" and pistol-packin' Yosemite Sam have been disarmed by HBO.

Their revamp of the Looney Tunes cartoons is done in the same vein as the classics, complete with all the violence but, not with any guns. The characters will still hit, run over, fight, blow up and booby trap each other but, there will be no guns.

"We’re not doing guns," Peter Browngardt, the series executive producer and showrunner, told the New York Times. "But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in." - USA Today

Of course, in the classics ... when a shot was fired ... someone losing all their feathers was usually about the worst that would happen to them. (More often than not, the gunner himself was the one that somehow paid a price.)  Even though no character ever really died or suffered injuries they didn't immediately get over, there was/is a lot of demand for cartoons to be banned from showing any kind of violence at all. It's been deemed bad for child development. An issue parodied a zillion times during "Itchy & Scratchy" shorts aired during episodes of The Simpsons.

Here we go again with twisted logic and mixed messages. (Look at all the shooting in other HBO productions, animated or otherwise.) If you feel showing violence and guns is bad, ok. Think that way then. Removing one, however, while keeping the other and saying it's '"essential to staying true to the originals", is incredibly hypocritical.

I wonder if other characters will also be "redesigned". Does Marvin The Martian get to keep his ray gun? (I hope real space aliens aren't offended by his portrayal of them as being out to destroy the earth and kill all humans. That could start a BIG problem.) Speedy Gonzalez can be a little offensive too and, what will become of stalker/wannabe rapist Pepe Le Pew?