What's up Doc? Future shock
Whenever Bugs Bunny uttered his trademark line, ''What's up, Doc?" it was a pretty safe bet he wasn't referring to his plastic surgeon.
Still, the wiseacre Looney Tunes rabbit along with a handful of his cartoon cohorts will be getting extreme makeovers for a new show, ''Loonatics," premiering later this year. The show is set in the year 2772; Bugs and Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Wile E.Coyote, Tasmanian Devil, and Lola Bunny (if you will, Bugs's boo) will be transformed into futuristic superheroes battling against the evil Acmetropolis.
What?!
Seems the folks at Warner Bros., home of Looney Tunes, believe kids today can't relate to the characters their parents watched countless Saturday mornings ago. At the same time, these trademark characters are too valuable and recognizable to be consigned to the vaults -- hence, the drastic changes. So come fall, we'll see a Bugs Bunny who looks like an unholy cross between a demonic rodent and Joan Rivers after too many hours at a Beverly Hills tanning salon.
To allay fears -- and even a cursory glance at the WB Online's message boards proves they are considerable -- Sander Schwartz, president of Warner Bros. Animation has said, ''The new series will have the same classic wit and wisdom, but we have to do it more in line with what kids are talking about today."
Hey, why not put Bugs in a hoodie, sagging jeans, and diamond-encrusted chain with a platinum carrot?
Overwhelmingly, people are condemning the whole idea of transforming Bugs into what one distraught fan on the WB message board called ''a Gothic nightmare." Someone else compared the move to the ''new" Coke debacle of the 1980s. Still another wrote: ''I will not allow my grandchild to watch the new group of things that you are proposing. You have changed a group of loveable [sic] characters into some evil looking things."
As hyperbolic as this may all seem -- these are cartoon characters, after all -- the Bugs Bunny fans are right.
If some woman anxious about her upcoming high-school reunion decides she wants to have her face broken and rebuilt for the cameras, that's her business. But a line needs to be drawn at an American icon like Bugs Bunny getting tricked out and pimped out like a rusted 1986 Ford Escort.
Yes, the wascally wabbit is an icon. First introduced in the 1938 animated short ''Porky's Hare Hunt," Bugs was then an unnamed smart-alecky hare, and his short, stocky appearance bore little resemblance to the character who would later become the undisputed king of Looney Tunes. Still, even then, there was just something immensely watchable about him.
While other cartoon critters were cute or silly, Bugs was fierce with bottomless moxie and a gleefully wanton disregard of authority. (Appropriately, the character was loosely based on comedian Groucho Marx.) He wasn't a bully and would only pulverize his nemeses when provoked. And, more often than not, he preferred a stinging battle of wits -- such as his many ''Duck season-Rabbit season" jousts with Daffy Duck -- to a physical confrontation. In the way that Bugs skirts decorum, it's not even too hard to see a hint of him in, say, comedian Chris Rock.
With his classic Noo Yawk accent -- a dollop of Brooklyn, a dash of the Bronx -- he was as crazy-cool as James Cagney at his double-breasted gangster best, and he didn't even need a gun. Schwartz maintains the ''Loonatics" will retain the irreverence and personality traits of the originals, but part of Bugs's appeal is that he looks like a bunny. Now, morphed into a freaky-looking alien thing -- think Arnold Schwarzenegger as a malevolent cottontail -- there's no tension such as there is with a cuddly creature declaring ''Of course, you know this means war."
In recent years, younger generations have been introduced to Bugs, Daffy, Porky Pig, and Tweety Bird through multidisc DVD sets featuring classic Looney Tunes shorts. Remarkably, the cartoons hold up, still as funny, sly, and subversive as ever. If Warner Bros. wants to revive their vintage characters, they'd be better served by creating better scripts and scenarios for them, always the core of the original cartoons' success, than by making the sorts of superficial, ill-conceived changes that threaten to make their franchise players generic and forgettable.
I mean, what's next -- hair plugs and liposuction for Elmer Fudd and speech therapy for Sylvester the Cat?
Renee Graham's Life in the Pop Lane column appears on Tuesdays. She can be reached at graham@globe.com
