“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
The terrifying dystopian vision laid out in George Orwell’s 1984 was supposed to be a story, not an instruction manual. However welcome to 2020. Nothing is safe, nothing is sacred. Not even a much-loved touchstone of our childhood.
HBO Max have apparently decided that the new version of Looney Tunes needs to be altered and have something erased. The hunter of duck and rabbit is no longer allowed to carry a firearm.
The show runners decided, in their infinite wisdom, that due to gun-violence in the USA the character Elmer J Fudd will no longer be armed. It gets even more ridiculous too. He will instead use a scythe.
Hilariously, Acme brand dynamite is still allowed, as are fiendish traps designed by coyote along with the personal injury that the incompetence of the user frequently causes. Just guns. Only guns are verboten.
Peter Browngardt, executive producers of the series, spoke to the New York Times and didn’t make a whole heap of sense when trying to explain the rationale:
“We’re not doing guns, but we can do cartoony violence – TNT, the Acme stuff.
I always thought, ‘What if Warner Bros had never stopped making Looney Tunes cartoons? As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way.”
That includes a central ethos of many of the cartoons that goes against some modern sensibilities. We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, ‘everyone needs to be friends’, ‘everyone needs to get along’. Looney Tunes is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”
Pick what you want out of that word salad.
Warner Bros Animation will produce 80 episodes of around eleven minutes. Analytics leaked outside HBO have hinted that Looney Tunes is the biggest hit on the HBO Max platform so, of course, they are going to change them.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can’t stand around here all day. I have to go outside and enthusiastically clap at the sky in case somebody from The Party thinks I am not being a correct and proper citizen. After that I am going to start a petition to ban Porky Pig on account of his existence upsetting the vegans.
