HBO Max has said “Good-bye, my baby / Good-bye, my honey / Good-bye, my ragtime gal” to 256 classic Looney Tunes shorts. On December 31, the streaming service dragged half of its 511-episode Looney library off the platform with an oversize hook, sparing seasons one through 15 (spanning toons from 1930 to 1949). Those deletions cover shorts released from 1950 to 2004, including such classics as What’s Opera, Doc?, Feed the Kitty, Rabbit of Seville, Duck Amuck, and One Froggy Evening. These removals come after a year of high-profile culling of content from the platform, which disproportionately affected animated titles such as Infinity Train, Summer Camp Island, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, and a planned, original Batman series.
Under the consolidations and cost cutting of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, many series were taken off as part of a post-merger accounting strategy, while some flagship series like Westworld will be licensed to free, ad-supported, streaming television platforms. The Looney Tunes cuts are unrelated to these other examples of off-loading, Vulture confirms; HBO Max’s license for the Warner Bros. shorts had simply expired, and the streaming platform chose not to renew it. No word was given on the fate of the other 15 seasons nor where the deleted shorts may stream in the future. When HBO Max launched in 2020, it touted its back catalogue of beloved Warner Bros. library properties with Looney Tunes featuring heavily in the promotion. Apparently, these were still being licensed to the streamer itself.
The good news? In eight years, these shorts will start entering the public domain. Until then? Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service really makes an excellent case for getting back into DVDs. That’s all, folks!
