From the Comments section, Luke weighs in on Warner Bros. new Looney Tunes:
"Saw the show. It was okay, boring, generic, and slow paced. Probably the biggest hit in the face is the sheer lack of background music. It just is not Looney Tunes without the orchestra. I've heard that the budget for each episode was 750,000 dollars. I don't know how hight that is in comparison to, say, Animaniacs, but they have to have money in there for orchestra tracks. The biggest problem is it just does not have energy, or charisma behind it. It is, what it is, Seinfeld with bad timing and no charisma."
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13 comments:
Cool!
If I had know you'd post, I'd have used more big words, and better structure. Second time I've been featured on your blog, it's an honor.
You saved me from having to watch the show.
Trust me, you did not miss a thing.
I was thouroughly dissapointed. I had been waiting a year to see this show, and this is what they gave us. They're playing it too safe right now, and need more creative risks.
That is far above the Animaniacs budget...if $750,000 is a correct figure, they're spending approximately twice what we spent on the average Animaniacs episode.
My feeling with any new Looney Toons is always too many cooks.
Someday someone will attempt a show where the characters are allowed to be themselves.
I think that show will succeed.
Tom,
More expensive even than Freakazoid which had to carry the amortized Bruce Timm development months.
Even factoring cost increases and inflation, 750k is huge, especially when considering Anamaniacs/Freakazoid used a 40-piece orchestra plus all the coffee and Danish the musicians consumed.
I've heard this orchestra size all over the place. On the show, it rarely sounded like a forty pieces, at most, 32 or so. I've read an old magazine article that said twenty. Now, whatever the size, the music was ALWAYS spectacular. The movie sounded like a much fuller larger orchestra than the show.
Thank you for making music a large part of the show, Randy Rogel, Steve and Julie Bernstein, and everyone else who provided the music for the show are a big influence on me.
But anyway, I agree with John. It does seem as if they don't know exactly what kind of show they want.
As for the budget.
They use toon city, yeamin, and Rough Draft to animate the show. Toon City is the only studio left that deals in full animation, and the episodes they animated (such as the first one) are animated on ones. Toon City also grasps the proportions much better than rough draft. So, basically, the animation budget is huge.
The animation on animaniacs I find is better even on the lesser budget.
I think most of the budget was blown on the cruise giveaway they advertised on the show.
Oh, Tom, weren't the timing directors animation veterans? (on animaniacs) I've heard Norm McCabe, among others.
Oh, and John TUNES, not toons. Just a friendly reminder. :)
One must also consider that animation is less expensive to produce nowadays with the advant of digital technology, and the fact no one is paying for cels, paper, and paint.
What ARE they spending this budget on?
Oh and one last question. Tom, was animaniacs animated on fours, or is that the DVD doubling frames?
Animaniacs was not animated on fours...but on twos...unless we deliberately wanted a scene to look crappy. On occasion, TMS would do a scene on fours and then we'd ask them to fix it.
Re: the new Looney Tunes Show. I have been told that, well over a year ago, the crew at Warner Bros. Animation completed pre-production on 10 shows. They fully produced and completed two of these half hour shows,and partially produced the other eight. And then the execs came in, fired more than half of the artistic staff, and decided to start over. So all ten of these first shows were thrown out. Trashed.
At that point, the artists and production staff had been working on these shows for about a year. So, add up all those salaries and all those overseas costs and Cintiqs for all and office space and coffee and you realize they spent a small fortune on that first batch of stuff.
I'd love to see that stuff. Could it be better than what they ultimately put on their air? Could be.
Of course, John is right. I suspect that whatever is genuinely wrong with this show can be attributed to "too many chefs." For these characters to succeed, they need to be allowed to breathe, and they need to be handled by artists and cartoon directors who have a vision, rather than mangled by executives who have little talent but major control issues.
They need another Jean MacCurdy and Steven Speilberg.
I think it depended on who was animating at the time at TMS. From the TMS animated episodes I can pick out about five to eight different animation styles. I think the fact that TMS had been producing anime for decades may atribute to their tendency to animate on fours, a very comon frame rate for anime.
I remember on Toonzone last year when we were discussing the show with takineko, keeper, me, and a few others. You came on one day, I believe, and said the show had been completely retooled. I wish I had seen some of the early production work. I still can't figure out why they felt that they needed to do without a great music track though.
Good news, the first episode pulled in a 2.5 which is HUGE for cartoon network. This shows the execs that there is still interest in these characters.
Wasn't this show created for the merchandise sales to pick back up?
It's simply a sitcom, and they're advertising as such. The executives clearly thought, "Well, Family Guy and its ilk are all the rage, so obviously people only want animated sitcoms."
They weren't clever enough to realize that that means "don't do Looney Tunes at all if what you want is a sitcom."
Indeed I'd very much like to hear even the premise of the original abandoned episodes.
As for the orchestra in the Animaniacs days, I believe a larger orchestra was used for the themes (Tom Minton described the recording session for the S&TM and F! themes back in the day and commented on the larger size used).
But anyway you can get a sense of the orchestra's normal size in that old clip that E! did about Animania IV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1W-wnh__DM
That was during a normal episode scoring (the episode "Bingo").
I'd be fascinated myself to learn the direction of the scrapped series.
Aparantly it was retooled because the art design was overly flat and UPA-esque, which I find odd.
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