Sorry, millennials, but Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t care about your nostalgia. A week after announcing the closure of Boomerang (as of September 30), WBD quietly shut down Cartoon NetworkArray. It now invites visitors to subscribe to Max for $9. 99 per month. .
However, those who still have a cable subscription can still happily watch Boomerang and Cartoon Network shows, making us wonder why we cut the cord in the first place.
This week’s double whammy makes it clear that WBD and its CEO, David Zaslav, care even less about their animation legacy than they do about making sure “House of the Dragon” has enough episodes to tell a complete story.
Compare WBD’s remedy of iconic animated characters in your library (Looney Tunes!Scooby-Doo!) with Disney’s. At Disney, old shorts proliferate, even with outdated attitudes and smoking, and Disney’s 2023 short “Once Upon a Studio” brought a hundred of the studio’s most indelible characters back to life. Meanwhile, Max got rid of 256 of his Looney Tunes shorts in 2023, adding bloodless classics like “What’s Opera, Doctor?”– and Zaslav separated the finished feature films “Coyote vs. Acme” and “Scoob!Holiday Haunt” because it is more successful not to publish content.
The bad vibes seemed to get worse when news broke this week that “Fixed,” an R-rated animated film featuring the voices of Adam Devine and Kathryn Hahn from Cartoon Network veteran Genndy Tartakovsky (“Dexter’s The Laboratory”), “Samurai Jack”), also wouldn’t be released through Warner Bros. , was completed.
It’s another movie designed for streaming from the old regime, but this one is rarely exactly the same as the story of “Coyote vs. Coyote. “Acme. ” “Fixed” was a co-production with Sony Pictures Animation and was a negative acquisition for Warner. Bros. IndieWire has shown that the rights have been returned to Sony, and now it’s the company looking to buy it rather than sit back. The WB shelf. But a source says that although the news has just been announced, the film has been quietly gathering dust for months waiting for Sony to do something.
One silver lining: Another film made through Looney Tunes for streaming, which is rarely very “Coyote vs. Acme,” has found a home: “The Day the Earth Exploded. ” Distributor Ketchup Entertainment rushed to release the film about Daffy Duck and Porky Pig encountering an alien invasion. This was also quietly among the victims removed from the WBD list in 2022, but at least someone cares enough to need other people to see it.
For what it’s worth, Warner Bros. Animation is being developed under the leadership of former DreamWorks executive Bill Damasckhe. He has a slate that includes an animated “Cat in the Hat” movie slated for the first quarter of 2025, “Oh, the Places. ” You’ll Go,” due out in several years, two films with Locksmith Animation and an Animal Planet film, about some photorealistic meerkats. One source says he hopes some footage will arrive at CinemaCon or Annecy next year.
Thank goodness TCM had enough heavy hitters in its determination in film history to save it from being gutted and stripped of portions as well. It’s a shame that the excellent anarchic antics of Elmer Fudd, Fred Flintstone and other icons who have spelled out their formative years for several generations don’t spark the same passion.
That’s all, friends.
Additional reporting via Brian Welk and Tony Maglio.