The studio has more more work in progress than it did a year ago. Wabbit, the latest incarnation of Bugs and Co., is deep into boarding and design. I talked to one of the people working on it who said:
"We're getting back to the original takes on the characters. The company knows it's gotten away from the Bugs and Daffy that made Looney Tunes popular back in the day. So we're going for the approach that made the characters work, the sight gags, the craziness. The new Mickey Mouse cartoons are, what? Three minutes long? These new Wabbit cartoons are going to be five minutes, which is a couple of minutes shorter than the old theatrical shorts.
The trick is, we can't do all of the same kinds of gags. We can't do a gun going on in Daffy's face, can't do all the shooting with guns. So we have to do work arounds, find jokes that work for the characters but avoid the modern prohibitions." ...
I told the artist I get why the Powers-That-Be don't want all the fire-arm humor from the old days, except it's actually kind of a dumb prohibition since all the old cartoons are out there and I seriously doubt that six-year-olds are going to differentiate between the original crop of LT shorts and the new cartoons without all the bang-bang, shoot-shoot.
The originals from the thirties and forties will still be on the internet and cable networks, correct? And they will have the off-limit violence in abundance, won't they? Like for instance ...
Elsewhere in the building, artists and designers are working on a new Lego TV series, which makes a great deal of sense, what with the Lego theatrical feature that cleaned up at the box office. (Synergy! That's where it's at! Monetize product on all the distribution platforms!)
Since this is a television project, animation is being done in China rather than Australia. Now if the Chinese will only wise up and kick in some tax incentives ...
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