~ Ｍ ＡＣＩＮＴＯＳＨ ＭＩＮＵＳ ~

🎙️Last night we made the cardinal stoner mistake of 'slightly too much weed before bed', and we needed to burn off a bunch of excess energy and insobriety. As we often do when we're zooted, we decided to watch cartoons about it; I'd been curious about the new Tiny Toons series, so we watched the first episode for that, and while it was solid, I had this immediate urge towards 'I wonder how the ORIGINAL holds up?

So I decided to do a fun little compare-and-contrast exercise; I watched the first episodes of both shows one after the other and tried to quantify the stuff I think is good, the stuff I think is bad, and the stuff I think is medium about both, why, and how they stack up to each other. And I got some interesting results. I wanna clarify: I tried to do my best to set aside as much personal bias as I could, and just tried to evaluate each show's first episode in a vacuum of context. Like, 'approach this as though you have never seen either before and are a child being introduced to not just these shows, but Looney Tunes as a whole, for the first time ever.'

Under the cut: I get a little looney.

• Premise and Plot Setup

"I've made up a list of EVERYTHING needed for a hit show!"
"Let's do Tiny Toons instead."
"Right."

🎙️ So this is an arena where Tiny Toon Adventures comes out feeling massively stronger than Tiny Toons Looniversity. Looniversity's premise kind of already presumes a familiarity with Looney Tunes... which, fair, that's a reasonable flex, it's Looney Tunes, a lot of people know that. But assume I'm, say, 6 year old me. I am not yet the child who will request Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner-themed everything for their personal wardrobe, plushies, and christmas stocking. Let's assume this show has to do the job of pitching me on the Looney Tunes aesthetic and style from the jump. Looniversity... honestly does kind of a poor job of that! It's so eager to jump into things and start doing character-driven and character-focused comedy and narrative that it kind of breezes by a lot of things that are actually pretty complicated and not particularly straightforward. There's a good example of this right off the bat, when Buster and Babs arrive at college, where they do a riff on the 'left turn at Albuquerque' gag, including burrowing there in a big tunnel... but it doesn't establish a context for that joke or for that reference. It's making a nod to a Bugs Bunny joke, but in this hypothetical scenario, I'm 6. The actual joke itself is 'and we made it with only TWO left turns at Albuquerque,' which... is itself a joke that isn't funny unless you know what the original joke is. See what I mean? We're not even 2 minutes into the first episode, and the first joke Buster and Babs have as a duo... is an injoke that is only funny for somebody who has intimate Looney Tunes knowledge. And this is in service of a narrative that is... charitably... pretty thin. It's a standard 'everybody making new friends at school' setup! It's fine. I had no major complaints besides feeling it was a little too formula.

Adventures, meanwhile, comes out swinging, and it assumes its job is 'sell you on the concept of cartoons as a medium.' Instead of assuming you have ANY familiarity with ANY of this, it takes some time to establish first principles. The very first thing it does is introduce you to the classic Looney Tunes with a set of vignettes that establish in advance their personalities so you know what some of the Tiny Toons are made in the image of, like we have examples that will immediately allow you to parallel Daffy and Bugs with their 'protege' figures once you meet them. Bugs is narrating the story, complete with some really fun goofs about him wanting payment up front and getting buried in a truckload of carrots. And right from the beginning, we get a plot setup about... making a cartoon. We get a demonstration in the process of designing lovable characters, we set-up some pathos with the animators and artists behind the scenes and the pressures cartoons exist in as a medium, and Buster and Babs are introduced to us not doing another character's bits, but coming up with their own from the get-go. Not only that, the plot setup does this fun metafiction thing where Buster and Babs create the show premise and scripts and setting themselves to help their artist out, with this sense of self-awareness of their role as beings who exist to improve the lives of the people who work on and watch them. Heck, we even get Montana Max pitched to us as a rejected character who really shouldn't have ended up in ANY show, which adds a note of existential dread to him as an antagonist. And when we do get the setup about Acme Looniversity, there's even a little musical number where Bugs and the older Looney Tunes explain the basic principles of cartoon humor and their technical terminology. It just slaps how good this setup is, with this whole metafiction angle of Buster and Babs playing Blind Watchmaker to their own canonicity and its urge to really teach its audience about cartoons rather than just be a funny school show.

To be clear, I don't even think Looniversity is bad on this front exactly. I just think it has a little too much investment in nostalgia for itself to really be a good introduction, particularly for a reboot that wants to shake up the core dynamics. This isn't coming off of, say, the then-recent success of crossover hits with the Looney Tunes like Who Framed Roger Rabbit; the most recent thing in an audience's mind for Looniversity is probably going to be the disastrous second Space Jam film. I think it banks a little bit too hard on slightly-unearned confidence and trust in its nostalgia appeal when its audience is fundamentally not that of the original show.

• Characterization

🎙️ Alright, let's swap course. Here's where Looniversity actually punches above weight. The first episode of the original show is largely just about Buster and Babs, and everybody else is getting a small walk-on while they serve as the main focus. Looniversity, though, makes it more of an ensemble from the get-go. Plucky and Hamton get really strong introductions that establish them as people just as much as Buster and Babs; Plucky has this new bit as the Ritzy Art School Kid and Hamton is recontextualized as, instead of just kind of a generic straight man with neat freak tendencies, a stressed-out and anxious child of a famous stage mom who has severe struggles around his perceived lack of comedic sensibilities. Where Adventures spent its effort setting up an understanding of its world, medium, and context, Looniversity spends its effort setting up more elaborate and textured characterization that really rewards the supporting cast and gives them more of an active presence.

...okay though but more than that we have to talk about maybe the best glow-up in Looney Tunes history. Which is Sweetie going from an 'I guess she exists' walk-on in the original show who isn't even really IN the pilot... to THIS in Looniversity. Y'all. I cannot express to you how much I love the new take on Sweetie.

Sweetie was one of the more divisive characters in the original show, largely because she exemplified one of the chief complaints a lot of people had with characterization: that a lot of the cast are effectively clones. And that is... honestly largely true. The biggest counterpart divergences in the original show are splitting Bugs up into two characters who both have their own vibes, and Montana Max and Elmyra Duff being interesting 'inside-out' inversions of Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd. But a lot of the cast can, at times, come off... a little flat? Plucky's only distinction from Daffy is he's not a jackass ALL the time. Calamity and Beeper are just identical to Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. But for nobody was this more true than Sweetie, who is just 'what if we made Tweety pink instead?' So here, we went from a complete 1-for-1 carbon-copy with basically no distinct personality from their predecessor whatsoever... to a punk rock rowdy with a heart of gold who manages to successfully come across like she is the coolest character in the series and has her own, completely independent shtick from her forebear(and also an immense amount of yuri subtext with Babs, which, let me tell you, I am eating well on that aspect of the show). Instead of just having her repeat Tweety's bits, verbatim, Sweetie instead gets to feel as unique as the rest of the cast and honest to god if you gave me a Sweetie-centered spinoff I would not complain. She's EASILY the best part of Looniversity so far by a WIDE margin. Love her.

And then it keeps doing interesting stuff with OLDER characters, too. Granny, of all characters, is the Dean at Acme Loo in this version, and they pitch her as a raucously funny mentor figure for the girls independent of the other Looney Tunes who gets some outstanding solo goofs that are honestly better than her much more stock role in old Sylvester and Tweety shorts; Granny referring to her bicep as 'Ruth Bader Gunsberg' got an actual full-chest laugh out of me. I honestly love that Looniversity like, takes some time off from setting up Buster and Babs to give the rest of the cast room to breathe.

• Production and Music

🎙️ Okay. Here's where we get into a spot where the two works are more even, but... with the edge towards the classic. I would say Tiny Toon Adventures is still sort of infamous for having very mixed quality episode to episode due to being worked on in batches by different studios, with some being absolute disasters. But first episode to first episode? ...well, the new show looks like it was animated well digitally, but Tiny Toon Adventures had a first episode animated by hand by Kennedy Cartoons and Wang Film Productions. Don't get me wrong, Looniversity does a lot with what it has, and has some really good effects bits like using digitally-processed lighting... but it cannot hold a candle to extremely-solid hand animation, not to me. There's a clear difference in the fluidity of the characters and quality and detail of cel backgrounding.

And that brings us to the bit where Adventures pulls ahead of Looniversity for keeps. Music. Tiny Toon Adventures is working with a full Spielberg-funded film studio orchestra. Every instrument is clearly being played by a real person holding a real physical object they are manipulating to make music come out of. Looniversity has... a synth orchestra. Same general sound, same general vibe, but tinnier and cheaper. The two different versions of the theme song can't even compare in richness of audio(even putting aside that the TTA one just flat-out does a better job introducing the show because once again it is Doing Its Own Thing instead of Referencing A Context Its Audience May Not Have).

Like compare this...

To this.

The sound quality is just so much warmer and more inviting and the production isn't post-processed and brickwalled into the ground in the original. Also, I dunno, there's just something about the new VAs for Buster and Babs that leaves me feeling a little underwhelmed? Eric Bauza as Buster is trying so hard not to just do the Bugs voice he did for The Looney Tunes Show(which was great, he's my favorite non-Mel Blanc Bugs), but he ends up feeling a little like a discount version of both characters as a result. And this is just an uphill climb for any VA, but there was no way ANY VA was going to own Babs the way Tress MacNeille did, given the role was straight-up written with her in mind. Ashleigh Hairston has big paws to fill but she does give it her all! I do wanna give MASSIVE props to David Errigo Jr. voicing both Hamton and Plucky, though; he gives both characters a lot of life and is really channeling his inner Mel Blanc on the roles.

• Conclusion

🎙️ Overall, I still prefer the original Tiny Toon Adventures, at least going first episode to first episode against Looniversity. It's got a lot of stuff I'm a big sap for, especially its metafictional plot opening, a stronger dynamic between Buster and Babs, and its generally higher production values. But I don't wanna discount Looniversity either; I think a lot of people have been kind of unfair to the show and neglect to realize TTA also had some really unsteady moments in its first season. Going forward I really want to see if Looniversity overcomes its growing pains and becomes a strong successor to the original, but I do have concerns it's more interested in having a dialogue with its precursor it can't match blow for blow. That's always the risk of being a reboot that isn't starting entirely from scratch; it invites comparisons that aren't always flattering.

But if worst comes to worst, at least we can say Sweetie is finally an actual character now.