02.06
You know those teenagers on the internet who constantly boast about how awesome their lives were as a kid, how grade school and Saturday mornings were their milk and honey? I’m not one of them. My childhood sucked. And yet, whenever my dad hit me just for playing with my Megazords a little too much, or those times when my caretaker at daycare told me I was worthless for not knowing the alphabet in the right order, there was always one solace: Looney Tunes.
Beyond Rugrats, Doug, Ren & Stimpy, and the like, I remember sitting in front of the TV with steadfast attention whenever I heard “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” or “Merrily We Roll Along” start up. From seeing Marc Anthony cry over having apparently killed that kitten, to watching Henery Hawk torment the hell out of Foghorn, I relished every short and every viewing. And not just due to the jokes or the timelessness, it was the message.
When you get down to it, Looney Tunes has essentially replaced Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales as little stories that kids have ingrained in their mind. And instead of giving lessons like “slow but steady wins the race” or “listen to your parents or an evil gypsy with a chicken-house will kill you”, these cartoons laid down the basic idea of how you shouldn’t let brute force and humorless cynicism get the better of you. And such a theme couldn’t be showcased better than in how Bugs bested overzealous hunters, savage gunmen, uncaring planet-destroyers, and a certain, conniving duck.
And contrary to that last word, my favorite short Nasty Quacks perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about by showing Daffy Duck giving his all to make sure some fat; sour-ass sod won’t kick him out of his house. We get to see manipulative pessimism get countered and trampled over by wit, zaniness, and a bit of romance at the end. And combined with some potshots at neglectful parenting, it turned out to be a perfect seven minutes that any kid who didn’t see eye-to-eye with their providers could relate to.
In short, Daffy, Bugs, Porky, Speedy, and the rest helped teach me that I wasn’t alone and that being a little looney could indeed triumph over the morose and forlorn… and then I grew up with an interest in reconnecting to those characters by going to news sites, forums, threads, and the like. It was the equivalent of walking into a mall bathroom during Christmas and finding Santa sodomizing a toddler.
These childhood heroes of mine were mutated into tools for people to judge, to look down upon, and to delude themselves into some sort of faux-elitism. Instead of understanding the fun and charm of these shorts, some have turned it into an overly organized, obsessive, and exclusionist hobby. If you were a kid that didn’t have time to watch LT, or just preferred to watch something that dared to be made after the Eisenhower era, you were viewed as filth in the eyes of the fanboys. And may woe fall upon you for even suggesting to them that you like cartoons made in countries that don’t speak English. Instead of just enjoying the view, they instead compel themselves to collect anything related to Freleng, Jones, Tashlin, and et cetera and stuff it where no one but them will be able to appreciate it. And whenever someone wishes to continue the LT spirit, they get into an utter tizzy and proclaim damnation upon every single detail. Sure, there’s an exception, but only about as rare as treasure in a landfill.
Enraged is not a word that should be used, since that just means stooping to their level. Instead, I would prefer distraught. Distraught over how these bohemian figures I’ve loved as a child have become symbols for the very people they were mocking. It made one sad to go to a LT-based board and finding nothing but spite and unpleasantness, as well as finding people I wanted to talk to about these cartoons ending up being the most humorless jackasses one could ever meet. I can’t even call it ironic, since that would imply humor could be drawn from the situation.
Through a failure to see eye-to-eye, I ended up putting away these childish things and have seldom watched the shorts since future viewings will do nothing but remind me of the kind of people that enjoy them. Even if I do block it out, nothing can really help the fact that acclaim and wonder aside, these are just old cartoons I’ve already seen several times over, and therefore ends up being a tad hard to get excited over used goods. And yet, despite the joy having been lost, I still remember what those endless Merrie Melodies viewings taught me. No matter how much you’re down, no matter what kind of shit people throw at you, you’ll always have an ace up your sleeve.
And I cannot stress any further my respect towards Looney Tunes for teaching me that.
Originally posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011.