Looney Tunes Is For The Children

Timmy Chalamet could use more Bugs Bunny

Now that the Oscars are in the rearview, and we can stop talking about whether or not Timothée Chalamet’s comments on the state of ballet and opera might have any impact on his chances of winning (spoiler: Michael B. Jordan was always going to win, and if anybody deserved to be a runner-up it was Ethan Hawke for his role in Blue Moon), I’ve had some time to think about this thing I read on Threads—which, btw, is currently the funniest social media platform right now—that I agree with 100 percent:

Going on two years of parenthood, I’ve gotten used to the way certain characters have a hold on the hearts and minds of our children: Elmo, Ms. Rachel, Bluey are all things I don’t totally understand, but Lulu or her friends absolutely love. Emily’s theory is that there’s something about Elmo that’s transmitted to babies while they’re in the womb, and a friend of mine explained the Ms. Rachel thing as the way she talks and dresses makes it easy for little kids to understand what’s going on. I get very I’m old-school about this stuff, because my young PBS education was Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street when Jim Henson was still alive, long before Elmo was the center of attention and YouTube gave kids and parents a billion other options. Maybe Elmo drives me a little crazy, and Ms. Rachel reminds me of Billy Madison’s paste-eating kindergarten teacher, but at the end of the day, they’re not for me and my daughter lights up when she hears or sees them. We don’t show her much television, and her Sesame Street watching is mostly limited to older episodes we can find online, but I’ve decided that sooner rather than later she’s going to start watching more Looney Tunes with me as part of her education.

I’ve been an ardent Merrie Melodies fan for as long as I can recall. When I try and think back to the things that hooked me early on, the aforementioned PBS stars of the 1980s loom large, but I also started catching glimpses of Looney Tunes around the age of 3 because I’m pretty sure you could catch Bugs Bunny on at any time during the day on the limited number of channels we had back when I was a kid. I was taken almost immediately, and now I look back and recognize there was a pattern that started watching those cartoons that featured classical music, as well as ragtime, jazz, and selections from the Great American Songbook. Looney Tunes helped me develop my own ideas of what I consider funny, and is probably is the reason I latched onto the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks pretty early on, but it also taught me to appreciate music. Now, as an adult, I go back and watch those same cartoons I saw as a kid and I can’t stop thinking about how perfectly executed they are in terms of music and action, how it makes sense that modern opera even owes a debt to “Kill the Wabbit,” and the reason I can’t stand when people call classical music stuffy or boring. Like everything else, I say, it’s all about context.

Not to beat the Timmy C. comments even deeper into the ground, but when he said that he didn’t want to work in opera or ballet because they were art forms that people felt they needed to keep alive, “even though like no one cares about this anymore,” he was basically missing the bigger point that all art is on life support: literature, painting, and, as Angelica Jade Bastién pointed out at Vulture, Chalamet’s cinematic bubble is even in trouble. I’m not sure if Timothée had previously been shielded from this conversation that’s been going on for, oh…a very long time, but Hollywood is in trouble, people don’t go to movies that much anymore, and media companies have traded criticism for whatever will get more “engagement.” The amount of times I’ve heard “people don’t read reviews anymore” is staggering, and I think misses a very large point that enough people have always read criticism that it gets filtered into the larger conversation, which makes it necessary no matter how hard management might find it to “sell.”

But that’s a whole other argument. This is about Looney Tunes. It’s about finding art appreciation in unexpected places, and a possible remedy to people—supposedly—not caring about classical music anymore. Show kids more Looney Tunes! I don’t expect it to become part of an elementary school curriculum, especially since America can’t seem to stop trying to keep kids from appreciating books and learning new ideas, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t start considering Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as educational. And for the but those cartoons are violent crowd, I just want to point to basically everything else on TV, the computer, in movies, and the real world. There’s a reason they call it “cartoonish violence,” and if you just do a good job keeping hunting rifles and 10,000 pound acme weights away, then you probably won’t have to worry much about your kids trying to play kill the wabbit.