In the new Looney Tunes Cartoons series on HBO Max, Elmer Fudd no longer carries his signature rifle.
“We’re not doing guns,” [series executive producer and showrunner Peter] Browngardt said in the New York Times. “But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.”
From CBS News:
Yosemite Sam will also lose his iconic double pistols in the series. Neither Browngardt nor WarnerMedia, HBO Max’s parent company, have explicitly stated the reason for the decision to drop guns from the series.
Last summer, Warner Bros. TV released a short on its YouTube channel titled, “Dynamite Dance,” which appeared to be from the new series. (Video above.) The cartoon shows Fudd chasing his nemesis Bugs Bunny with a scythe before the rabbit puts a stick of lit dynamite in the hunter’s mouth. The 90-second clip features many sticks of dynamite and a plethora of massive explosions as Bugs Bunny blows up Fudd in multiple creative ways, all set to Amilcare Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.”