Greetings cartoon fans!
Jon and I decided that the boxes of random junk with the Warner Bros. Cartoon characters' pictures on it that we have collected over the years ought to be shown off, as a sort of blog museum.
We all know that the classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series ended in 1969. For good. Some like to claim it ended earlier and forget about the 1960's period altogether. The fall of theatrical cartoons' golden age may have killed the production of new shorts, but it didn't kill the characters. Television saw to that, and for 0ver 40 years, new audiences have discovered Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote, Porky Pig, and all the rest and called them their all-time favorites.
And throughout all these years, Warner Bros. has licensed the characters for all kinds of odds and ends. Bugs Bunny has appeared on everything from comic books to Kleenex packages. There's so much stuff out there that nobody has ever come close to listing everything. But that's good for us, because it means that we will probably never run out of curios to show you. If we don't have it, we know about it. And we might even have a picture of it.
We'll also show fun things we find on YouTube (before Warners takes it down for legal reasons.) There have been lots of classic commercials and small bits of animation created with these characters. So let's get started....
Here's a commercial from the final year of the Warner Bros. cartoon studio. Plymouth Motors' 1969 Road Runner is a classic car, so it's fitting that its ad campaign starred two classic characters. The animation here is not by Chuck Jones, who had left Warners in the mid sixties. This appears to be the work of Robert McKimson's unit.
Enjoy, and there is much more to come!
1 comment:
This ad is all kinds of bizarre!
First off, for some reason, the soundtrack is a modified version of Spanky & Our Gang's "Sunday Will Never Be The Same." Took me a while to make sure it wasn't just a sound-alike, but it's too close to avoid infringing, so they either paid the record company or IP enforcement was way more lax back then.
Secondly, I swear to God that sound's like Morgan Freeman narrating at the end.
Third, the Road Runner doesn't even make use of the eponymous vehicle!
If someone had told me that there existed a cartoon ad for the Plymouth Road Runner that had Morgan Freeman narrating, and "Sundays Will Never Be The Same" as the soundtrack, I never would have believed them before now. The wonders of The Internets...
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