Looney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series (2019–2024) Warner Archive Blu-ray Review
I slept on Looney Tunes Cartoons for too long. While I love the classic material, I hadn’t watched the new series because the kids aren’t just into Looney Tunes. Having the chance to catch up with the Warner Archive Blu-ray has been an awakening. Peter Browngardt’s cartoonist-driven revival brings the Looney Tunes home in the definitive physical media collection.
Table of Contents
The Bet That Paid Off
In 2017, Peter Browngardt was sitting across a lunch table from Audrey Diehl, a creative executive at Warner Bros., politely declining to hear about the project she wanted to discuss. As the meal wrapped up, he said the thing that had been on his mind: “You know, what I really want to do is to direct a Looney Tunes short.” She was surprised he was a fan. She booked him a meeting with studio president Sam Register. Browngardt told Register he wanted to do it in the spirit of the classic 1940s cartoons.
That conversation produced Looney Tunes Cartoons, the series that premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2019, launched as the very first original HBO Max series on May 27, 2020, and ran through six seasons and 209 shorts before concluding with the release of “Daffy in Wackyland” in June 2024. It is also the most successful attempt in decades to restore the Looney Tunes characters to something approaching the creative and comedic authority they exercised during the theatrical short era of the 1940s and 1950s, and by some arguments, the most successful attempt since that era ended.
The Warner Archive Collection six-disc complete series Blu-ray, available now at MovieZyng, is the physical media home this series has been waiting for. Pick it up. If you have children in your life, or if you are an adult who has never stopped loving what Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck can do when directed by people who understand why those characters work, this set belongs on your shelf immediately. The complete series Blu-ray released on May 19, 2026, and MovieZyng is the place to find it.
Back to the Premise, Back to the Punchline
The creative mandate Browngardt established for Looney Tunes Cartoons was specific and historically informed. The series would operate like the classic theatrical shorts: cartoonist-driven storytelling in which the animators drew and wrote their own segments, resulting in a visual style that shifted between contributors while maintaining a consistent aesthetic framework rooted in the designs of the early 1940s. Bugs Bunny would appear in his Wabbit Twouble design. Daffy Duck would be drawn from Draftee Daffy. Elmer Fudd would be a hybrid of his early 1940s models. Every character would look like themselves at the moment when they were most themselves.
This design philosophy addressed one of the persistent failures of post-theatrical Looney Tunes productions: the tendency to update or modernize the character designs in ways that made them look contemporary while stripping away the specificity that made them legible as characters rather than as brand identities. The Bugs Bunny of the 2000s-era Loonatics Unleashed was a corporate asset wearing Bugs’s name. The Bugs Bunny of Looney Tunes Cartoons is Bugs Bunny, shaped by the same graphic logic that Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett used to make him the most recognizable cartoon animal in American animation history, and the difference is immediately visible on screen.
The segments would vary from one to six minutes, which brought the series into productive conversation with its theatrical predecessors. A classic Looney Tunes short ran seven to eight minutes and contained enough comic invention for a complete dramatic structure: setup, escalation, reversal, punchline, curtain. Browngardt’s shorts operate at compressed versions of that structure, some landing in under two minutes, others taking the full six to build something with a beginning, middle, and several escalating middles before the ending. The compression, when it works, produces a density of gag per second that the classic theatrical format achieved and that subsequent Looney Tunes productions had almost universally failed to replicate.
The decision to exclude firearms from the first season, which meant Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs with a scythe rather than a shotgun, generated considerable commentary at the time and was reversed with the second season. The initial restriction reflected a corporate caution about violence in children’s entertainment that the series’ creative team clearly found constraining, and the restoration of the traditional weapons in subsequent seasons produced a noticeable return to full Looney Tunes dramatic logic. Elmer with a shotgun pursuing Bugs through the forest is not simply a visual choice. It is the activation of a relationship between predator and prey that the entire dramatic economy of the Bugs Bunny short depends on, and the scythe version of that relationship, however competently executed, was missing something structural. The complete series on this Blu-ray contains both eras, and viewing them sequentially makes the distinction legible in ways that watching any single season does not.
What Looney Tunes Cartoons got right from the beginning, and what it maintained across its full run, was the understanding that the Looney Tunes are not primarily about violence, or chaos, or even slapstick in the purely physical sense. They are about character. Bugs Bunny works because he is always already ahead of the situation. Daffy works because he is always barely behind it. The Road Runner works because he does not care about the Coyote at all, which is the most devastating possible response to obsession. The series understood that these character dynamics are the engine of the comedy, not the specific gags, and it built its best shorts around that understanding with a sophistication that the franchise had not consistently achieved since the theatrical era.
The history of the Looney Tunes franchise between the theatrical era and Looney Tunes Cartoons is a history of the difficulty of getting this right. Space Jam (1996) treated Bugs and friends as brand ambassadors. The Looney Tunes Show (2011) placed them in a domestic sitcom setting that systematically removed the physical comedy that defined them. Wabbit / New Looney Tunes (2015) tried to restore the slapstick tradition but was hampered by character designs that did not look like the characters and a tonal uncertainty that the theatrical originals never suffered from. Looney Tunes Cartoons addressed all of these problems simultaneously by going back to the source: the animators who understood the characters, the designs that established them, and the format, the short, that they had always been suited to.
Peter Browngardt, Eric Bauza, and the Voice of Bugs Bunny
The production of 209 shorts across six seasons required a level of sustained creative output that the series met by leaning into the cartoonist-driven model that gave individual artists genuine creative ownership over their segments. The approach meant the series had no single visual voice, but it also meant that talented animators and character designers could bring their own personalities to the material in ways that the more committee-driven approach of earlier Looney Tunes revivals had suppressed. The best segments in the complete series feel genuinely authored, which is the quality that the classic theatrical shorts have always demonstrated and that the franchise had spent decades trying to recover.
Eric Bauza, who voices Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Marvin the Martian, and a significant portion of the supporting ensemble in addition to those primary roles, is one of the production’s most important creative assets and one of the most undersung vocal performances in contemporary animation. Bauza inherited these characters from predecessors who had defined them for generations, and his versions are not impressions of prior performances but independent characterizations built from the same sources. His Bugs has the laconic confidence of the theatrical Bugs without being a Mel Blanc imitation. His Daffy has the sputtering egotism and comic vulnerability of the character at his best without aping the specific inflections of prior voice actors. What Bauza brings to both characters is the understanding that they are different kinds of intelligence operating in the same universe, and that the comedy between them comes from the collision of those intelligences rather than from any particular vocal trick.
The demands of this voice casting are not trivial. Bauza is essentially providing the central consciousness of the entire series across dozens of characters, and the consistency of his characterizations across 209 shorts without the performances ever sounding rote or formulaic is a genuine professional achievement. When the series was announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2022 under the banner “Looney Tunes for Everyone,” Bauza was at the panel, and his enthusiasm for the material communicated the same quality of genuine investment that the performances demonstrate on screen. The Daffy of a two-minute short about a parking ticket and the Daffy of a six-minute adventure that takes him across multiple escalating disaster scenarios are the same character rendered at different resolutions, and Bauza finds the appropriate register for each without losing the essential Daffy-ness that makes both work.
Bob Bergen’s Porky Pig carries the tradition of Mel Blanc’s stutter with affection and precision, and Bergen’s Porky is one of the series’ most charming recurring presences. Bergen has been the voice of Porky Pig for decades and brings to the character a long-term investment in its emotional logic that gives even the shortest Porky segments a warmth that more cursory handling could not produce. Jeff Bergman handles Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, and Foghorn Leghorn with the professional reliability of a voice actor who has been working with these characters for decades and who knows their comedic registers as well as anyone alive. Fred Tatasciore brings a physical roughness to Yosemite Sam, Taz, and Gossamer that distinguishes his versions from any previous characterization without feeling discontinuous with the character history.
The roster of Looney Tunes characters who appear across the series’ six seasons includes not just the major stars but the full extended ensemble: Pete Puma, Beaky Buzzard, Hubie and Bertie, Petunia Pig, Cicero Pig, Claude Cat, and others who had been absent from Looney Tunes productions for so long that their reappearance here constitutes a genuine fan-service achievement. The series’ commitment to the full breadth of the Looney Tunes universe rather than just the top-billed names is one of its most affectionate qualities, and the best of the shorts built around less familiar characters demonstrate that Browngardt and his team had genuinely internalized the franchise rather than simply licensing its surface.
The Complete Arc: Six Seasons of Cartoonist-Driven Comedy
The series premiered with its first ten episodes on HBO Max in May 2020, with the subsequent batches of shorts arriving through April 2021 to complete the first 1,000 minutes that Warner Bros. Animation had originally announced as the production’s scope. The response to those initial episodes confirmed that the cartoonist-driven approach had worked: Rotten Tomatoes reported 88% approval from critics, with the consensus describing the series as “a vibrantly goofy return to form, perfectly calibrated cartoon comedy.”
Production was briefly complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed the in-house animation facilities and required the team to resume remotely, but Browngardt confirmed in 2020 that work had continued and that the full scope of commissioned content would be delivered. Jim Soper, the character designer whose Instagram work had caught Browngardt’s attention during development, helped establish the visual vocabulary that would govern the series’ aesthetic coherence across its many individual animator contributors.
The second season brought back firearms and expanded the character roster. A Valentine’s Day special in February 2022, a Halloween special in September 2022, and a Christmas batch all appeared across the subsequent seasons, giving the series a relationship with the calendar that the theatrical shorts had also maintained through seasonal releases. A separate animated film, “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” was developed during the series’ run but falls outside the scope of this set. The final season aired in July 2023, with “Daffy in Wackyland,” a bonus episode that premiered at the Animation is Film Festival in October 2023 before being released on streaming the following June, serving as the series’ formal conclusion.
“Daffy in Wackyland” deserves specific mention as a creative achievement within the series. The short is an extended homage to the original “Porky in Wackyland” (1938) and its 1949 color remake “Dough for the Do-Do,” two of the most formally adventurous cartoons in the theatrical Looney Tunes canon. This version, directed with genuine affection for the original’s hallucinatory visual logic, demonstrates that the series at its best could reach beyond the pleasures of the efficient gag short into the more ambitious territory of the surrealist cartoon as a coherent art form. It is the most formally ambitious thing Looney Tunes Cartoons produced, and the fact that it exists gives the complete series a final statement that the preceding 208 shorts had not quite been positioned to make.
Disc Information and Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Series Title | Looney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series |
| Original Run | 2019–2024 |
| Original Network | HBO Max (Seasons 1–5) / Max (Season 6) |
| Created by | Peter Browngardt (based on characters by Chuck Jones and others) |
| Executive Producers | Sam Register, Peter Browngardt |
| Voice Cast | Eric Bauza, Bob Bergen, Jeff Bergman, Fred Tatasciore |
| Characters | Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Tweety, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Taz, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, and many more |
| Total Shorts | 209 |
| Segment Length | 1–6 minutes |
| Seasons | 6 |
| Production Company | Warner Bros. Animation |
| Disc Format | 6-disc Blu-ray set |
| Aspect Ratio | 16×9 (1.78:1) |
| Video | 1080p HD |
| Audio | DTS-HD MA |
| Rating | TV-PG |
| Release Date | May 19, 2026 |
| Distributor | Warner Archive Collection |
Special Features:
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Looney Tunes Presents: Sports Made Simple | Six shorts created for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games |
| Looney Tunes Presents: Sports Made Simple | Six shorts created for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games |
A note on the Sports Made Simple supplements: these twelve shorts were created for YouTube broadcast in connection with the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, and they use the character designs and animation style of the earlier New Looney Tunes (Wabbit) series rather than the HBO Max series. They are brief, one-to-three-minute promotional and semi-educational clips, and they are included here as bonus content rather than as core episodes of Looney Tunes Cartoons. Fans of the HBO Max series who are expecting the same visual style and creative approach should understand that the Sports Made Simple shorts are a separate production context.
How It Looks: Video Quality
Looney Tunes Cartoons was produced as a digital animation, and the 1080p presentation on this Blu-ray delivers it with the crispness and color fidelity that modern digital animation warrants. The series employs hand-drawn character animation in a style deliberately evocative of the theatrical short era, with backgrounds and layouts that echo the mid-century design vocabulary of the original Looney Tunes without attempting photographic reproduction of it. On Blu-ray, the lines are sharp, the color palette vibrant, and the variety of visual approaches across the series’ different animator-directors is consistently legible.
The range of visual styles across the complete series is itself one of the more interesting technical facts about the disc set. The cartoonist-driven model meant that different shorts look genuinely different from each other in ways that a unified production model would not have permitted. Some shorts have a flatter, more graphic quality. Others are more dimensionally rendered. The backgrounds vary in complexity and stylistic approach in ways that reflect the individual animators’ aesthetic preferences. The Blu-ray presentation handles this variety honestly: there is no attempt to homogenize the visual approaches across the complete series, and the result is a set that rewards viewing at random as well as sequentially, because adjacent shorts may look quite different from each other while remaining unmistakably in the same creative universe.
The aspect ratio is 16×9, which places the series in its proper streaming-era production context while visually distinguishing it from the Academy-ratio classics that inspired it. The wider frame does not diminish the visual authority of the shorts; the best of the series’ animator-directors used the horizontal space with purpose, extending the visual gags into wider compositions and staging the character conflicts with spatial awareness that takes the full canvas into account. The Blu-ray presentation communicates that compositional intelligence clearly.
The sheer quantity of content across six discs, 209 shorts plus the twelve Olympic promotional clips, means this is a set designed for browsing and revisiting rather than linear viewing. The disc organization mirrors the series’ seasonal structure, which allows collectors to navigate to specific characters, seasons, or the bonus material without difficulty.
Audio and Supplements
The DTS-HD MA audio presentation across the set delivers the series’ sound design with appropriate fidelity. Carl Stalling’s ghost is very much present in the DNA of the series’ musical approach: Looney Tunes Cartoons makes extensive use of underscore that echoes the classical and pop music references of the theatrical short tradition, and the audio presentation gives those musical choices the clarity they require. The series hired composers who understood the Stalling model of underscore as active participant in the gag rather than passive accompaniment, and the result is a musical dimension that contributes to the comedic timing in ways that the theatrical shorts demonstrated at the highest level and that most animation produced since has failed to match.
The voice performances of Bauza, Bergen, Bergman, and Tatasciore are consistently clean and well-positioned in the mix. The sound effects, which are as important to the Looney Tunes aesthetic as any other element, are placed and timed with the theatrical tradition’s requirements in mind. The crack of Elmer’s shotgun, the metallic pong of a Bugs-administered frying pan, the specific silence that follows a Coyote’s mid-air pause before gravity reasserts itself: all of these are present and correctly rendered, which is both technically straightforward and aesthetically essential.
The Sports Made Simple Olympic supplements, while stylistically distinct from the main series, are presented cleanly and will be of interest to collectors who want a complete record of Looney Tunes Cartoons-era animation production. They are what they are: short promotional content created for specific broadcast contexts, included here because they are part of the extended universe of animated content produced around the same franchise and characters during the series’ run. They are genuinely entertaining in their modest way, even if their relationship to the HBO Max series is more adjacent than continuous.
Looney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series Is Available Now from Warner Archive
Looney Tunes Cartoons is the best Looney Tunes series since the theatrical shorts ended, and the complete series Blu-ray is the best way to own it. The six-disc set preserves the full run of 209 shorts in a physical media format that makes them accessible for the kind of repeated viewing and casual browsing that this kind of short-form comedy most rewards. The series will be handed to children, shown to adults who remember the theatrical shorts with love, used in classrooms discussing animation history, and revisited with sustained pleasure across decades. It is that kind of achievement.
There is also a conversation worth having about why this series deserves to exist on physical media at all, given that streaming has been the dominant delivery platform for animation since before Looney Tunes Cartoons launched. The answer is what physical media always provides for content that matters: permanence. The theatrical Looney Tunes shorts have been removed from streaming platforms without notice, restored to different platforms, dropped again, and cycled through a digital availability history that makes comprehensive, consistent access impossible for anyone who does not own the material on disc. The Looney Tunes Cartoons complete series will not be pulled from a streaming platform after this disc ships. It will exist, on shelf, where anyone who owns it can watch it whenever they choose, in whatever order they choose, without a subscription, without buffering, and without the anxiety of the title disappearing between viewings.
That argument, which sounds technical, is actually an argument about what animation like this is for. Looney Tunes Cartoons was made to be watched repeatedly, in any order, by people of any age. The theatrical shorts were designed to be projected in theaters on different programs in different cities, so that any single short could be a viewer’s entry point into the universe. The Blu-ray complete series set is the closest home video equivalent of that exhibition model: all 209 shorts available, in permanent physical form, at any moment the viewer wants them.
Peter Browngardt’s bet at that lunch table in 2017 paid off. He got to make his Looney Tunes short. He made 209 of them, and they are collectively one of the best things Warner Bros. Animation has produced in the streaming era. The fact that they are now available in a complete physical media collection, with MovieZyng as the destination for Warner Archive releases, is the best possible home video outcome for a series that spent its entire streaming run being genuinely excellent and genuinely undervalued by the casual viewer who never quite made time for it. Make the time. This is the version to own.
