It’s taken almost nine years, but my son is finally getting into high culture, and by that I mean he’s started to watch MeTV Toons. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your local listings to see if this glorious over-the-air broadcast network is available in your area. MeTV Toons is a 24-hour channel that shows nothing but cartoons, mostly from the 30s to the 80s. If you’re looking for the greats of Hanna-Barbera, like the Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, or even more obscure shows like the Hair Bear Bunch or Peter Potamus, you’ll find them there. Miss the Saturday mornings from when you were growing up? They’ve got Smurfs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Real Ghostbusters, and The Super Mario Brothers Super Show. In the wee hours of the morning you can find things like Silverhawks or Speed Racer, and on Sunday nights they have the obscure 70s animated sitcom Wait ‘Till Your Father Gets Home (starring Tom Bosley) and what I believe to be the most recent cartoon on the docket, the 90s cult classic Freakazoid.

But by far, my favorite things on the network are the blocks of classic theatrical shorts. On any given weekday, you can turn on the network starting at 7 p.m. Eastern and get treated to a full five hours of the likes of Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Mr. Magoo, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, and of course, the greatest cartoons in the history of animation, the Looney Tunes. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Eddie decided he wanted to watch these cartoons instead of (or at least in addition to) his standard marathons of modern shows like Blaze and the Monster Machines or Peppa Pig, and I couldn’t be happier about this transition. 

I’ve seen the vast majority of these cartoons before, of course, but watching them again never gets old. I have been reminded frequently over the last few weeks that Bugs Bunny is the greatest comedian of his generation, that Porky Pig kind of got screwed over when Daffy Duck took over as the star of Warner Bros studios, and that Chuck Jones was a creative genius on the level of Rembrandt and Shakespeare. If you want to argue with me about that, you better come armed with something that won’t make me think Duck Amuck is a work of human achievement equal to, or perhaps surpassing, the moon landing and the chocolate chip cookie. Spoiler: you can’t do it.

All that said, the greatness of these cartoons of the past has been filling me with a degree of sadness as I remember that Warner Bros today doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do with these toons. There are certainly creative people making an effort. Cartoon Network’s The Looney Tunes Show from 2011 was a great modernization of the characters, casting Bugs and Daffy as the stars of an Odd Couple-style sitcom. HBO Max’s Looney Tunes Cartoons similarly brought back some of the classic chaos of the golden age. But both of these efforts ended prematurely, and fans of these greatest of all cartoons are left dangling, thirsting for more. 

Twice in this decade alone, Warner Bros has chosen to make and then SHELVE feature-length projects starring the characters: Daffy and Porky’s science fiction film The Day the Earth Blew Up, and the animation/live action hybrid Coyote Vs. Acme starring Wile E. Coyote, John Cena, and Will Forte. Fortunately for all of us, the two movies were saved from the scrap heap by Ketchup Entertainment, which released The Day the Earth Blew Up last year and will be gracing us with Coyote Vs. Acme in just a few weeks.

In their heyday, the Looney Tunes’ biggest rivals were the stars of the Disney animated shorts, and although Bugs and Mickey can duke it out for the title of most recognizable cartoon star on the planet, these days I don’t think that analogy works anymore. Whether you like all of their products or not, Disney has never allowed the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy to languish the way Warner Bros has Bugs, Daffy, and Porky. No, these days I think the better comparison for the Looney Tunes is another Disney property, the Muppets. 

Both of these pantheons of characters are classic entertainers with old-school sensibilities and a healthy dose of chaos. And in both cases, despite the fact that there is an audience thirsty for new content, the studio can’t seem to get their act together and make it happen. And it’s not for lack of trying – if you recall a few months ago there was a new Muppet Show special starring Sabrina Carpenter. It was a blatant cry for the studio to greenlight a new ongoing series in the vein of the classic show. The special was a huge success, loved by both critics and audiences, and although the streaming numbers are never made public, all indicators suggest that it did gangbusters for Disney+. Yet for some asinine reason, six months later, they’ve made nary a peep about bringing it back as a series. If they don’t say SOMETHING about it at next weekend’s D23 Expo, we all just may throw up our hands and weep.

The Looney Tunes are in a similar situation. They’ve been around forever. Everybody knows them. Everybody loves them. But the suits can’t seem to figure out what to DO with them. And the solution is actually the same. What the Muppet Show special proved is that the Muppets are at their finest when they’re doing a musical comedy variety show with human celebrity guests. In other words, the best thing to do with the Muppets is to do the thing that made them beloved in the first place. The same is true for the Looney Tunes. And the Looney Tunes are at their best – as those shows I mentioned before proved – in short-form comedy cartoons. I like the feature films. The Day the Earth Blew Up was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see Coyote Vs. Acme. But there’s a reason that Chuck Jones never tried to blow up the “Hunting Trilogy” of cartoons where Bugs and Daffy try to outwit Elmer Fudd into a 90-minute movie. They work best in short installments.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there isn’t as much of a demand for animated shorts anymore. At the height of their popularity, the Looney Tunes (and all those other shorts you can see on MeTV Toons) were put in movie theaters as a precursor to the main attraction. You rarely see that these days – even Pixar hasn’t done one in nearly a decade. And without putting them in front of a new movie, what do you do with a cartoon short? It’s not like creating a bingeable TV series, the formula doesn’t work with short films. 

Again, this is one of those solutions that seems pretty damn obvious if only you can get anybody with the power to do it to pay attention. Put them back in theaters. Warner Bros has a goal of 12 to 15 theatrical releases a year. That’s at least a dozen chances to put a cartoon in front of an audience. And sure, it might not have necessarily been appropriate in front of Oscar bait like One Battle After Another, but would anybody have been upset to see a Bugs Bunny cartoon before Supergirl or A Minecraft Movie? Hell, I would even love to see OLD cartoons before a new movie – they could have preceded Superman with the classic Daffy short Stupor Duck. And while it’s true that people are increasingly frustrated with the pre-show content in movie theaters, that ire is focused on the plethora of advertising and a bloated number of trailers followed by Nicole Kidman talking about how awesome theaters are to an audience that’s already in a theater. I’ve never heard anyone walk out of a movie and say “That would have been great if they hadn’t put that friggin’ cartoon before it.” (Well, except for that one time Disney screened an entire 22-minute Frozen TV special before Coco, but that’s a different story.) I think that if you advertise the short with the feature, if people know what to expect, most people will be happy to have it.

There is some hope on this front, by the way. In June, Warner Bros screened Daffy Season, a new Looney Tunes short directed by Todd Wilderman and Hamish Grieve, at the Annecy International Animation Festival. The short was apparently made to debut during FIFA World Cup madness – it’s about Daffy losing his mind as everybody around him gets so obsessed with soccer that they turn into brain-dead zombies. As a short, the premise is hilarious. And after the short was screened at the festival, it was announced that it will accompany the theatrical release of Warner Bros’ new version of The Cat in the Hat this November. I have to admit, my interest in going out to a movie theater to watch The Cat in the Hat was pretty low, but now that I know that a new Daffy cartoon is going to be with it, it’s going to become a top priority.

This may be a one-off thing, of course. Warner Bros made the short specifically as part of a World Cup event, and throwing it into theaters is kind of a bonus that we didn’t expect. But if it does well, if it is received well, is there a possibility for more such shorts in the future? God, I hope so. Because being immersed in MeTV Toons over the past few weeks has reminded me of just how excellent so many of those shorts were, and in a world where everything feels like it’s falling apart all the time, having the delightful mayhem of Bugs and Daffy, the Road Runner and the Coyote, or Sylvester and Tweety back on the big screen where they belong…I think that could do us all a world of good.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok.