In the face of numerous unsuccessful attempts in recent years to update Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes characters, the studio is planning to debut a new half-hour Looney Tunes Show on its sibling Cartoon Network in the fall and to bring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote back to movie theaters on July 30, the New York Times reported today (Thursday). The newspaper said that the studio is spending $750,000 for each of the 26 TV episodes in the series. "We talked at great length about whether we were audacious enough to take on such iconic treasures," Peter Roth, president of Warner Brothers Television, told the newspaper. "It's both costly and risky, but I think an extraordinary opportunity." The Times did not indicate whether the new cartoons will be handdrawn or computer generated; however, it quoted Sam Register, head of creative affairs at Warner Bros. Animation, as saying, "The minute you start drawing Bugs Bunny exactly as he was drawn in 1949, you expect the same animation and the voice to be exactly the same. ... That's obviously not possible, so you pull the best stuff from the characters and do something slightly new with it."

20/05/2010