When Looney Tunes switched to color in 1942, and the Merrie Melodies line ditched the music around the same time in favor of its own rising star - one Bugs Bunny - differences between the two were limited to their distinctive theme songs, until 1964 (when both series wound up using the same theme music as a result of using a modernized, and slightly bizarre, opening/closing sequence). Merrie Melodies, introduced in 1931's " Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" featuring the ( suspiciously Mickey Mouse-esque) character "Foxy", were initially intended as the music videos of their day, basically animated commercials for the Warners-owned sheet-music library. The first set, Looney Tunes, was introduced with 1930's " Sinkin' in the Bathtub" featuring minstrel-like mascot Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, and for its first decade relied more heavily on recurring characters and thus lower budgets. Harman and Ising animated the shorts until 1933, when a dispute with Schlesinger over budgets led them to depart for Van Beuren Studios.
That basing cartoons around popular public-domain songs - or, even better, ones the studio already owned - was a fast and relatively cheap way of producing them didn't hurt any, either.
Pictures initially distributed the cartoons for independent producer Leon Schlesinger before buying the studio in 1944 and moving it in-house in 1955.Īs the names indicate, these cartoons were originally meant to be imitations of Disney's Silly Symphonies. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies are two series of theatrical cartoon shorts first released between 19.
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