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Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny, the lynchpin of the Looney Tunes, has been called everything from "classic" to "perennial" to "an American institution" to "one of our national heroes"--and "wascally wabbit," "long-eared galoot," and a lot of other things besides! But most of us just like to call him Bugs.
Bugs was voted the most popular in the entire short-subject field in the United States and Canada for the year 1945, and then stayed in the Number One spot for the next 16 years straight. Today Bugs continues to draw a crowd - in fact, a recent survey showed him to be the most popular animated character in the world! When Bugs' classic cartoons were being made and regularly released to theaters in the 1940s and 1950s, it was his stardom in short subjects that skyrocketed his studio to prominence in the animation field. Part of Bugs' great achievement had been to establish a strong personality who can exist for 7 minutes at a time, show us a facet of his personality, disappear for weeks, months, maybe years at a time, then reappear and still be recognizeable and entertaining. His possibilities were not exhausted by any single episode. The trick was not to sustain seven minutes, but to live for 50 years. And once you've sustained over 56 years of amazing popularity with one generation after another all over the world, it's hardly likely you're going to have much trouble sustaining a 90 minute feature. Michael Maltese, one of Bugs' writers, remembered that in the old days, a theater's marquee had to say no more than "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" for people to plunk their money down--forgetting what features or other short subjects were playing, forgetting that the "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" would be over in 15 minutes--and, most of all, forgetting their troubles. "After a while, Bugs Bunny was so well loved by the audience that he could do no wrong," said Maltese. "They loved the rabbit, and what he stood for." Friz Freleng, one of the leading directors of Bugs' classic shorts, once remarked, "The cocky characters, for some reason, the public seems to like. They don't like those kinds of people in real life." Mel Blanc, who first provided The Rabbit's voice, believed that "Bugs Bunny appeals to the rebel in all of us. Everybody loves a winner, and Bugs Bunny always wins." There's a moment in 'A Hare Grows in Manhattan' when Bugs dives into a manhole to escape the bulldog pursuing him, and between the time the dog leaps in the air and the time he reaches the manhole, Bugs has managed to resurface, grab the manhole cover, and pull it into place--turning the dog's face into something resembling a waffle. It's a simple enough gag, but the point is that there is a look of such total delight on Bugs' face as he performs the act, that he turns the whole business into something else altogether, a conflict of viewpoints rather than a physical conflict between two animals. Bugs is Puck reborn; he enjoys the scrapes he gets into because he knows he'll win eventually. This goes a long way toward making him the irresistible character he is: he holds out the possibility that the Battle is winnable, that we can vanquish the foe and have fun doing it, that every setback can become another challenge, another excuse for high spirits. This is possibly the critical factor of what we love about Bugs: that he will not only make us laugh but make us feel victorious and triumphant. There are heroes and there are comedians; rarely do the two meet. This made him a difficult character to write for, but it's what gave him that special spark that made him the phenomenon that he has been. From the time he first asked Elmer Fudd "What's up, Doc?" right up to the release of Space Jam, Bugs has been both sophisticated and naive, innocent and guilty, Child of Nature and Street-Tough Smart Guy, fool and hero, one of the most rounded and all-around characters in the history of film, a multi-faceted gem. A Wild Hare and Beyond Then hardy hare has been delighting fans of every age, nationality, and persuasion for longer than the majority of his youthful fans probably realize. Most of the current crop of screen heroes were not even born when Bugs first rose casually from his rabbit hole, chewing on a carrot, peering down the barrel of a gun, and cracking a cool "Eh-h-h-h-What's up. Doc?" out of one corner of his mouth, in a cartoon called 'A Wild Hare', directed by Tex Avery and released by Warner Bros. in July of 1940. Bugs, like most characters, inspires that insistent question, "Who created him?" A simple answer is expected. But no simple answer works. The clearest family line reaches back to Tex Avery, who gave The Rabbit his famous personality. When asked how Bugs came into being, the soft-spoken Texan was laconic. "Oh," he said, "it just came out of a cartoon. We decided he was going to be a smartaleck rabbit, but casual about it, and his opening line in the very first one was `Eh, what's up, Doc?' And, gee, it floored `em! They expected the rabbit to scream, or anything but make a casual remark--here's a guy with a gun in his face! It got such a laugh that we said, `Boy, we'll do that every chance we get.' It became a series of `What's up, Docs?'." "We didn't feel that we had anything until we got it on the screen and it got quite a few laughs," Avery recalled. "When we saw that on the screen, we knew we had a hit character," Freleng remembered. "He was the most timid of animals, yet he had courage and brashness. The whole gimmick was a rabbit so cocky that he wasn't afraid of a guy with a gun who was hunting him." But the new character had no name at first. Jack Rabbit, or Jack E. Rabbit, was the personal choice of Avery himself, since he had spent so much time hunting jackrabbits and since "I thought it would please my Texas friends." But another of the Warner cartoon directors, Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was "Bugs," had already asked designer Charlie Thorsen to create a rabbit for an earlier cartoon, and when Thorsen had submitted the model sheet, he'd labeled it "Bugs' Bunny." Now, with this model sheet circulating the studio, and with a search for a good name underway, publicist Rose Horsely jumped on the label "Bugs Bunny" as "so cute!" It wasn't "cute" to Tex Avery. "That's sissy," he said. "Mine's a rabbit! A tall, lanky, mean rabbit. He isn't a fuzzy little bunny." But Horsely had the ear of Leon Schlesinger, who produced the cartoons for Warner Bros. Schlesinger thought a moment, then said, "O.K. Bugs Bunny. We'll go with it." "We were always very proud of what we were doing there," says Phil Monroe, one of the Warner animators. "We thought our pictures were funnier than anybody else's. We were all geared for humor - the animators would be asked to submit gags for pictures, and a lot of them were used." A new style was developing: most of it was Avery's doing, most of it was taking place right there at Warner Bros., and most of it was focused on The Rabbit. Finally the directors realized you couldn't look down on this character, the way you could with most cartoon clowns. You could only look up to him. It was at that point that Bugs came to life, individually, for each of the directors at Warner Bros., and, better than that, became a focal point for everything they saw as the best in themselves. Almost as soon as they started working with the character, the Bob Clampett unit, with McKimson in the lead, started giving Bugs less of an oval shape than the first model sheets called for, and his face began to look less ratlike. Then they started structuring the nose differently, and the teeth were naturally anchored to the same bone structure, in a more appealing facial design. By the time Clampett made Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid in 1942, he had arrived at what we might call the Classic Bugs Bunny. By late 1944 the same design was reaching the screen in the cartoons of the other units. Once Freleng made Stage Door Cartoon, released near the end of that year, the McKimson look was universal. "Bugs was gradually becoming a more complex character," Chuck Jones remembers. "The writers and directors were all beginning to realize that we had the potential of a brilliant and lasting star on our hands, a rambunctious, unbridled, and often balky baby Bugs that needed now to grow, to smooth out; we must find out how to harness that energy without destroying the spirit and how to guide the child without steering it. Bugs changed because he had to, not because we were brilliant." Bugs, madder than the March Hare and saner than Alice, knows he's in a cartoon. He always had a trick, and he always had the prop that was necessary to pull of that trick. Whatever it was - a sledgehammer, a stick of dynamite, an anvil, a cannon--he needed it, he got it? Where did it come from? Nobody wanted to know, they just wanted to see him pull off his fast one. Bugs was the cartoon version of the loud-mouthed but loveable Brooklynese smart-aleck who turns up in the cockpit, in the barracks, or on the battlefield in every World War II movie, as inevitable as the flag, and, apparently, just as effective in rallying the spirits of a beleaguered nation. The idea that the battle was winnable was a very popular one during World War II. "It was during those war years...that the Bugs Bunny cartoons...passed Disney and MGM for the first time to become the Number One short subject," Bob Clampett recalled. The studio received an offer from the Utah Celery Company of Salt Lake City to keep all staffers well supplied with their product if Bugs would only switch from carrots to their crunchy greens. Later the Broccoli Institute of America strongly urged The Bunny to sample their product once in a while. It never happened. Mel Blanc would have been happy to switch to any of these vegetables, since carrots made his throat muscles tighten and the words couldn't come out, but it was no go. Carrots were Bugs' trademark. The only concession they ever made was to move the carrot-crunching sounds and dialog to the last spot in the recording session. In the 1950s, with the post-war Baby Boom transforming his previous audience from rowdy kids in uniform to mature adults with responsibilities, Bugs found his new audience extended to include those "responsibilities." The nation was filling its nurseries and schools to capacity with children, and they were all becoming Bugs Bunny fans. By 1957 Bugs' perennial popularity had become as much a bewilderment as a source of pride. The theatrical short subject market had gone through a series of drastic changes, Bugs' contemporaries from the early `40s had largely faded from the scene, even Disney had phased out the one-reel cartoon, and television was posing new threats every year. The world of 1940 was becoming history. Didn't matter. Bugs went on being Champ, no matter what he did. |
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Daffy Duck
Daffy Duck is definitely a bona fide "star," despite general claims to the contrary. He has appeared in more than 120 cartoons since his introduction in the 1937 short "Porky's Duck Hunt." Daffy's appearance and frenetic, unpredictable personality have made him immediately recognizable and a favorite with audiences around the world. In his first cartoon, "Porky's Duck Hunt," Daffy inverts the role of hunter and prey, thwarting Porky Pig's expectations and frustrating him until he finally waves a sheaf of papers at the duck and shouts, "Th-th-that's not in the script!" The hyperactive duck became an immediate hit and was christened "Daffy" in 1938 in the short titled, "Daffy Duck and Egghead." Daffy and Porky became an established team, and as their partnership developed, Daffy's initial insanity was tempered to a neurotic paranoia. He became less wildly untethered and more cunning and conniving. In Friz Freleng's `You Ought To Be in Pictures" (1940), Daffy convinces Porky to quit his steady job in cartoons to become "Bette Davis' leading man." When Porky leaves, the devious duck immediately tries to persuade the producer to give him Porky's starring roles and billing. Inevitably, Porky returns and Daffy's hopes are dashed. Daffy's aggressive and overbearing personality played well off Porky's shy and less confident demeanor, but Chuck Jones developed another more volatile combination: Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. Jones' Bugs of the 1950's was naturally cool and intelligent, and possessed great wit and quickness of thought. Daffy, previously known for his sense of unbridled frenzy, became a thinking duck, although most of his thinking centered around himself. "l may be a nasty little black duck," he confides to the audience, "but I'm a live little black duck!" Daffy strives to be level-headed and witty as Bugs but, try as he may, the fact that he does not succeed drives him crazy and propels the humor. Daffy's vanity, greed, haste and disregard for all warnings appearing before him invariably set him up for failure, and with each failure, he sets his goals even higher. In Jones "Rabbit Fire" (1951), "Rabbit Seasoning" (1952) and "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" (1953) and Freleng's "A Star's Bored" (1956) and "Show Biz Bugs" (1957), the conflict between Daffy and Bugs grows into the Cartoon equivalent of an epic struggle -- with only Daffy left to do the struggling. This is the quality with which audiences identify; regardless of the cosmos' conspiracy against him, Daffy never gives up. In addition to headlining with a variety of co-stars in more than 120 cartoons during the last 50 years, Daffy has also starred in two feature length movies, two Saturday morning programs and two prime time television specials. In 1987, Daffy starred as an entrepreneurial paranormalist in the first Looney Tunes theatrical short in twenty years, "The Duxoris" The following year he was a feature player in "The Night of the "The Duck." Both of these shorts can now be seen as part of the feature length film "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters." Daffy's epic adventures can also be seen Saturday mornings on ABC's "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show;" weekdays on Fox's "Merrie Melodies Starring Bugs Bunny & Friends" and daily on Nickelodeon's "Looney Tunes." |
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Sylvester
Sylvester...the quintessential tomcat. All the cat food he can eat and still he insists on following his instincts and persistently pursues the most elusive of meals -- Tweety. Sylvester, however, has been a slave to his infincts since the beginning of his long film career. Sylvester debuted in Friz Freleng's 1945 short, "Life With Feathers," uttering the line, "Sufferin'succotash!" which would become his classic trademark for the next six decades. Freleng tried several versions of the cat-chases-bird formula, beginning with this cartoon with a diabolical twist: Sylvester stumbles upon a suicidal lovebird who has had a fight with his wife and is now intent on fining his way into Sylvester's mouth! Puzzled by the bird's desire to be devoured, Sylvester immediately becomes suspicious and refuses to eat the bird. Sylvester eventually relents, but the bird receives a telegram from his wife asking him to return home. The tables turn and Sylvester chases the bird, until the end of the cartoon when the wife returns and the bird once again wants to be eaten. Sylvester's fledgling career might have ended after his second cartoon, "Peck Up Your Troubles" (in which he unsuccessfully hunts a wily woodpecker), were it not for a fateful turn of events. Bob Clampett departed from Warner Bros. in 1947, leaving behind some preliminary work on a new short. The short would have been the third to feature a Clampett creation: a little canary named Tweety. Freleng liked the idea of teaming Sylvester with the sweetly volatile little bird. The resulting short, "Tweety Pie," won the Academy Award for Freleng that year, the first of several for both Freleng and Warner Bros. Animation. "Tweety Pie" established Sylvester and Tweety as a team, and they went on to appear together in 41 cartoons over the next 40 years. In "Bird Anonymous" (1957), Sylvester (unsuccessfully) tried to give up chasing birds altogether, and joined a support group of cats with the same affliction. One of the members loses control and tries desperately to catch Tweety, who assesses the situation and decides, "Once a bad ol' puddy tat, always a bad ol' puddy tat." "Bird Anonymous" was the recipient of another Academy Award for the trio Sylvester, Tweety and Freleng. Sylvester's career is not limited to acting as Tweety's foil: he co-starred with Porky Pig (under the direction of Chuck Jones) as Porky's loyal, but misunderstood, pet in "Scaredy Cat" (1948), "Claws for Alarm" (1954), and "Jumpin' Jupiter" (1955); and he played the embarrassingly incompetent father of Sylvester, Jr. in a series of cartoons directed by Robert McKimson. Sylvester is currently working with Tweety in support Of "Tweety's Global Patrol," a national education program urging elementary school children to reduce, reuse and recycle. In addition, Sylvester may be seen Saturday mornings in "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show" on ABC; weekdays on Fix's "Merrie Melodies Starring Bugs Bunny & Friends" and daily On "Looney Tunes" on Nickelodeon. |
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Tweety Bird
Tweety, the tiny, wide-eyed, baby-talking canary, debuted in the 1942 Merrie Melodies short 'A Tale of Two Kitties," directed by Bob Clampett. Clampett claimed that the design for the bird was based on his own baby pictures. The next two Tweety shorts, "Birdy and the Beast" (1944) and `A Gruesome Twosome" (1945), established Tweety's peculiar and appealing personality; a sweetly innocent nature coupled with a willingness to resort to fairly brutal actions to defend himself against the most dangerous forces of the world -- cats. In 1947, director Friz Freleng was preparing a cartoon featuring his character Sylvester the cat, with a woodpecker whom Freleng had used in a previous short. Clampett had done some preliminary work on a new short featuring Tweety when he left Warner Bros. Freleng decided to use Tweety rather than the woodpecker, resulting in the short, "Tweety Pie," which went on to win an Academy Award. Tweety and Sylvester became a enduring comedy team and appeared in 41 cartoons over the next 40 years. Tweety was exclusively employed by Freleng in this long-running chase with the exception of a cameo in a 1954 Chuck Jones short, "No Barking." As the series continued, Freleng introduced new antagonists to broaden the cat-chasing-bird formula including Granny (Tweety's nearsighted owner) and Spike the Bulldog, who provided the tiny canary with some powerful but little-needed assistance. Tweety's innocent ("I tawt taw a puddy tat!"), lust-hatched view of the world make the contradictory force Of his actions hilarious. Neither malicious nor hostile, Tweety dispatched his predators with startling speed and a wallop that surprised and delighted audiences. Tweety has been a staple of prime time and daytime television animation for over 30 years. He has been the co-star of the Saturday morning series "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show" on ABC since 1986. Tweety can also be seen weekdays-on Fox's "Merrie Melodies Starring Bugs Bunny & Friends" and daily on "Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon." A select collection of Tweety's cartoons are also available on videocassetteS and laser discs. In addition to his television popularity, Tweety (along with Sylvester) is the subject of "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety" by animation historian Jerry Beck (Henry Hot, 1991). Tweety is also the spokesperson for "Tweety's Global Patroll," a national education program urging elementary school children to reduce, reuse and recycle. |
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Driven by the continual, overpowering urge to eat, this slobbering, snarling, omnivorous tornado with teeth doesn't care what he gobbles. The Tasmanian Devil demolishes everything in his path, leaving behind a trail of rubbish, and reducing whole forests to toothpicks in seconds.
Of course, Bugs Bunny is his primary choice for dinner. But Taz is no match for the clever Bugs, and he always ends up whirling off into the distance, still hungry and leaving a trail of laughter behind him. |
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Long before television and movies made interplanetary travel popular, Marvin The Martian was touring the galaxy in his spaceship, The Martian Maggot. Interplanetary relations have never been the same!
Accompanied by his faithful lieutenant, K-9, Marvin The Martian is the original "alien." His unique out-of-this-world appearance, large expressive eyes and his disintegrating ray gun betray his extraterrestrial origins. Marvin's bright intelligence and incredible tenacity convince him that he is light years ahead of any earthlings he may encounter. His unearthly superiority complex and flat sense of humor complement the zany antics of the other Looney Tunes characters and make him a strong personality. Marvin The Martian has grows in popularity because of his unique reflection of the contemporary high-tech environment and space-age lifestyle. |
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Elmer Fudd
With his weak chin, infant's head, soft and round demeanor, and perennially befuddled expression, Elmer Fudd is, intellectually speaking, the dimmest bulb of the Warner Bros. animated stars. Elmer, as much as Daffy and Yosemite Sam, is Bugs Bunny's arch nemesis, for over fifty years stalking but never nailing the "wascawwy wabbit." Intrepid and earnest, he is nonetheless a hopeless simpleton. Elmer's voice is the key clue to his inner workings. Timid and hesitant, he seems almost always on the verge of tears as he speaks. His voice, lacking the slightest baritone, is throaty and thin, using very little air to produce it. It is as if Elmer had no diaphragm, which gives everything he says a fragile timidity. Even emotions such as confidence and rage are expressed through the same thin reed that passes as Elmer's voice. His trademarks are his mispronunciation of the letters r and l as w, and his legendary laugh, a laugh that is a nervous embarrassment, fueled more by trepidation than humor. And even though he seems always at the verge of a tantrum, there is still a note of dumb hopefulness to what he says. Elmer is most often cast as the hunter on the trail of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck or both, although he often turns in his shotgun to take on other roles. Because he takes everything at face value (he is not deep enough to take things any other way), he is easily confused and duped. He is easily influenced, even by his enemies, and is more than willing to believe anything he is told. He is like a child--curious and incapable of true wariness--which makes him the perfect target for Bugs Bunny, whose well-being Elmer is constantly threatening. Despite his babyish ways, Elmer has an adult's sense of sentimentality which makes him doubly vulnerable. He can, of course, be fierce, but he angers slowly, and his rage is just as easily defused by his constant sense of confusion. He simply cannot remain focused on being angry long enough to stay angry. The thing that sends him into a fury is being made a fool, but he is such a fool that most of the time he isn't conscious of it. When his temper flares, though, he's like a malevolent baby, although Elmer is such a softy (and so inept) that he's never really killed anything. He is incapable of seeing a ruse when it's played in front of him (Bugs Bunny's endless parade of cross-dresser femme fatales, for instance), and when he does occasionally catch on, he is re-fooled with little effort. |
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Road Runner
Chuck Jones directed the first animated short film from a story by Michael Maltese. Jones considered a jackrabbit-first, but chose the Road Runner because a running bird seemed funnier. In their first film, Wile E. Coyote used eleven different methods to try to catch the bird--with absolutely no success. (Fast And Furry-ous was the first cartoon done in 1949.) The Road Runner never hurts or touches the coyote, and he always stays on-the road. There is no dialog or conventional narrative in a Road Runner cartoon. Between 1949 and 1980, the Road Runner starred in a total of 42 theatrical short films and became one of the most verbally imitated favorites of all of the Looney Tunes characters (how tricky is "beep-beep"?). |
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Wile E Coyote
He was first brought to the screen by Chuck Jones. The second Road Runner cartoon didn't appear until 1952, when the fleet-footed bird and ever-hungry coyote teamed up in "Beep, Beep." After that, it was nonstop, with the production and release of more than 40 Road Runner animated films, co-starring Wile E. Coyote up to 1980 when the last, "Soup or Sonic", arrived onscreen. Wile E. is the great American anti-hero. Wile E. actually pursued Bugs Bunny in the 1952 cartoon -- "Operation Rabbit", in which he also spoke! Wile E. introduced ACME products into the American pop cultured lexicon. Wile E. made appearances with a slightly different look as Ralph Wolf in a series of cartoons with Sam the Sheepdog |
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Porky Pig
Porky Pig was the first Warner Bros. character to emerge as a star in the late 1930's. He made his screen debut in 1935 as part of the ensemble animal cast of Friz Freleng's "I Haven't Got A Hat," a parody of the "Our Gang" comedies. He was paired with Beans, a cat, whom he quickly overshadowed, and had his solo debut in a 1936 Tex Avery short, "The Blow Out."
Porky underwent a series of dramatic physical transformations with each director. He ballooned to grotesque proportions in Tex Avery's "Golddiggers of 1949" in 1936, and slimmed down in Frank Tashlin's 1937 "Porky's Romance." Director Bob Clampett redesigned his physique again that same year, finding a balance between diminutive and obese.
Along with changes in his appearance, Porky's voice was also revamped. Initially, Joe Dougherty, an actor with a genuine stutter, provided Porky's voice, but in mid-1937, a new voice was created by a radio performer who had just joined the staff... Mel Blanc. He toned down the overly exaggerated stutter of the first Porky cartoons and ensured both Porky's enduring fame with the signature line, "That's All, Folks."
Visually, Porky held the same charm as many of the other Warner Bros. animal characters, but his eagerness, wide-eyed innocence, and shy stutter created a persona which made him emotionally sympathetic and lifted him above other more caricatured cartoon stars. His personality provided a soft springboard for the development of brasher and more self-possessed characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. After all, Daffy Duck and the germinal version of Bugs Bunny made their debuts opposite Porky in "hunting" films, "Porky's Duck Hunt" (1937) and "Porky's Hare Hunt" (1938), respectively. Porky also remained a strong solo star, receiving an Academy Award nomination in 1943 for Frank Tashlin's "The Swooner Grooner."
The Porky Pig who developed under the direction of Bob Clampett established himself as a major star; it was during these years that his durable partnership with Daffy Duck emerged. Porky and Daffy would co-star under a wide variety of directors, with Porky playing the foil to a usually unbridled and conniving Daffy.
Porky also starred with Sylvester in a trio of Chuck Jones-directed shorts: "Scaredy Cat," "Claws for Alarm," and "Jumpin' Jupiter." Porky shines here in ways that he never could around the more dominating Daffy.
Porky made the transition to TV in 1960, appearing in a supporting role in `The Bugs Bunny Show." Several years later he attained top billing on ABC's "Porky Pig & Friends." Porky can currently be seen on the Saturday morning series "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show" on ABC; weekdays on Fox's "Merrie Melodies Starring Bugs Bunny & Friends" and daily on "Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon."
In addition to his television appearances, Warner Bros. has also released video and laser disc collections of Porky's best work.
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