Looney Tunes Commercial Theater

Step right up, folks! Need some fried chicken? How about some chocolate? Take your Chevy to McDonald's and bring the Gatorade, because it's time for a whole slew of Looney Tunes commercials from the 80's and 90's!

First of all, here's a Hershey's commercial from 1986, with a PSA segment from "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show" thrown in for good measure!

Road Runner Hershey's Commercial 1986
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

Then, a pair of 1987 ads for Kentucky Fried Chicken, featuring, ah say, featuring Foghorn Leghorn!

Foghorn Leghorn KFC Ad
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

Foghorn Leghorn KFC 1987 (2)
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

Fast Forward to 1994, where we find Sylvester playing basketball for McDonald's:

Sylvester mcdonalds
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

And sometime in the late 90's, we have Taz riding along with the Earnhardts in a Nascar race for Chevrolet:

Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Taz Chevy ad
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

And of course, 2 years after "Space Jam", Bugs and Marvin still wanted to be like Mike...

Gatorade "Like Mike" (1998)
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

Chuck Jones animation in "Stay Tuned"(1992)

I stumbled upon this clip on Youtube and thought it was interesting. A Chuck Jones animated work I'd never heard of, from a movie I'd never heard of! In "Stay Tuned" (1992), The late John Ritter and TV actress Pam Dawber play a quarreling couple who find themselves sucked into their TV, where they are forced to "star in" and survive a bunch of shows created by the Devil. They find themselves (as mice)in a Looney Tunes-like cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, with music by Bruce Broughton ("Tiny Toons"). Keep an eye on the envelope the Ritter mouse sends to the Acme Corporation...you'll see Jones' face on the stamp!



By the way, by our count, this is Misce-Looney-Ous blog post #100!

Looney Tunes Candy Sticks

Currently available at fine Dollar Stores near you are these Looney Tunes Candy Sticks from "World Confections Inc" out of Brooklyn, New York. These are apparently the modern-day equivalent of the old "candy cigarettes" of yesteryear but with a more politically correct name. As you can see below, these "candy sticks" look like pieces of chalk. They taste like chalk, too.



While the bulk of the 22 packs in this bag were indeed Looney Tunes characters (Bugs, Daffy, Tweety and Taz)... I found it interesting that there were also a bunch of Tom & Jerry and Flintstones characters mixed in as well.



I guess calling them Looney Tunes Candy Sticks was easier than calling them Random Cartoon Characters That Are Owned by Time-Warner Candy Sticks.

Tweety on a stick

Hilarious blog post over at boingboing.net (recently linked to on Jerry Beck's site):

Tweety Bird popsicle doesn't look like Tweety Bird

TNT Toons

With all the rare and obscure clips surfacing on sites like YouTube lately, there is still something I am waiting to pop up on those sites that hasn't yet. In the early 1990s, those days before Cartoon Network, TNT had a block called The Wild World of Shorts featuring loads of classic cartoons (along with stuff like reruns of Gilligan's Island). Most notably was a show called Bugs Bunny & Pals which aired daily in the morning and in the early evening hours. The show had a mix of pre-48 WBs along with shorts from MGM, DePatie-Freleng (Pink Panther, Inspector, Ant & The Aardvark, and the horrible Hoot Kloot), and the Popeye cartoons. I have fond memories of those shows but haven't seen any "Wild World of Shorts" bumpers or show intros show up on the Internet yet! Maybe some nice person will upload them after reading this plea (or send us an e-mail).

After Cartoon Network launched, the TNT cartoon block was revamped as "TNT Toons" and would often do tie-ins with the new sister channel. Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones (which Turner now owned, of course) were added to TNT's line-up. Bugs Bunny & Pals would become Bugs Bunny's All-Stars at one point and. in the end, was known as Bugs Bunny! Bugs Bunny! Rah! Rah! Rah!. TNT and TBS both finally dropped their cartoon blocks in the fall of 1998.

Here are a couple bumpers that would play endlessly during the final couple years of the "TNT Toons" block.

Cheese Chasers

"Cheese Chasers" (1951) was Chuck Jones' final Hubie and Bertie cartoon. It's also Marc Anthony the bulldog's only speaking role. I can't think of any real reason to post this, except it's funny and it's a Jones masterpiece. Enjoy!

Hare Jordan

Everyone remembers "Space Jam", the 1996 hit movie that paired the Looney Tunes characters with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the movie itself found a lot of its inspiration in a series of Nike commercials about 5 years earlier. I know of only two, but there may have been others. The ads were a huge hit, driving sales and popularity for Nike, Looney Tunes and Jordan...as big expensive cross-promotions have a habit of doing. This particular ad is also one of the first modern uses of Marvin the Martian, and may have resulted in Marvin's popularity gain in the 90's. Why would they have chosen Marvin to advertise Air Jordan basketball shoes? Well, it's pretty obvious...he wears sneakers!

Not sure who provides Marvin's voice here. I'm told Noel Blanc did Porky at the end, and it sounds like Greg Burson doing Bugs.

[UPDATE - Bob Bergen e-mailed us to say: "Actually, that's me doing Porky in the Hare Jordon spot. Neil Ross did Marvin. And Greg Burson did Bugs. OH-I also did Porky's agent!!"]