An Introduction

When you talk about Warner Bros.-Seven Arts cartoons among cartoon affectionados, there are probably a few things which come to mind - cheap animation, cheaper gags, and characters that, aside from Cool Cat and Norman Normal, are pretty forgettable. It's easy to dismiss this era as being where Looney Tunes hit the bottom of the barrel (and admittedly, not without some justification), but I think it's worthy of a little more discussion than that.

I will confess right now that I am not an expert in animation by any means. I'm just another enthusiast, and if you think that means I'm unqualified to discuss this obscurest of Looney Tunes eras, then fair's fair. However, I think it's important to go a little further than just snarking at these cartoons, and that it's best to understand exactly where they go wrong, and what actually does work with them.

Background

Starting in the early 1960s, Warner Bros. began to wind down their long-standing cartoon studio which, aside from a temporary shutdown in 1954-55, had been going in some form since 1929. The beginning of the end came when Chuck Jones was fired in 1962 for breaching his contract to work on the UPA film Gay Purr-ee (though reports vary as whether or not he did so knowing the writing was already on the wall for the studio), and the studio was slowly wound down over the year that followed. Most of Jones' staff followed him to his new studio, Sib Tower 12 Productions, which was quickly hired to begin working on a new series of Tom and Jerry shorts after Gene Deitch's less-than-spectacular run on the series. 

The remaining staff dispersed to various other animation studios, but several key players ended up at DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, formed by legendary Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng and David H. DePatie, who was the head of the old Warner Bros. cartoon studio for its final two years; another extremely prolific Looney Tunes director, Robert McKimson, would soon join the studio. DePatie-Freleng quickly made a name for itself when Blake Edwards hired them to produce an animated intro sequence for a little Peter Sellers comedy (or technically a little David Niven comedy as it was promoted at the time) by the name of The Pink Panther. DePatie-Freleng spun its title animation off into its own series, and soon added another spin-off by the name of The Inspector, based on Sellers' now-iconic character Inspector Clouseau. 

In the meantime, the management at Warner Bros., seeing DePatie-Freleng's success, the renewed popularity of Tom and Jerry under Jones' auspices, and probably also the Walter Lantz Studio's still producing a healthy amount of Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy shorts, realized that while they may have been following in the footsteps of other major animation players (MGM having shut down their animation department in 1957, and Disney having largely abandoned production of theatrical shorts by this point), they had been perhaps a little hasty in shutting down their studio. Restarting their own studio was considered too financially risky, however, so Warner Bros. were able to mend fences with DePatie and Freleng, and hired their studio to produce a new series of Looney Tunes shorts, while also producing the animated bumpers for The Bugs Bunny Show.

Bugs Bunny himself would never actually appear in any of DePatie-Freleng's cartoons, however (and neither, for that matter, would Foghorn Leghorn). Indeed, their roster of characters was soon wound down to those that Warner Bros.' marketing department had identified as the most popular, namely Wile E. Coyote and the Road-Runner, Speedy Gonzales, and Daffy Duck.

The new Coyote and Road-Runner shorts, after an initial couple by DePatie-Freleng's team, were farmed out to another studio, Format Films, which was crewed by former Warner Bros. and UPA staff. These shorts, directed by Rudy Larriva (who had been an animator for Jones up until the early 1940s) aren't unwatchable by any means, but they are much, much weaker than Jones' work on the series, with lackluster animation, the same stock music cues recycled over and over, and a lack of variety in the contraptions that Wile E. uses to try catching his nemesis.

As for Daffy and Speedy, someone got the idea that since these were two characters who were popular individually, naturally they'd be even more popular if they were in the same shorts together. While this idea wasn't necessarily doomed from the get-go (the first short with the duo, "It's Nice to Have a Mouse Around the House", is relatively decent), DePatie-Freleng soon started focusing near-exclusively on this duo, and the cartoons soon started focusing on a formula that can be generally summed up as "Speedy arrives in a location, Daffy spends five minutes acting like a jerk for little-to-no reason, Speedy defeats Daffy."

Despite the slide in creative quality during this era, Warner Bros. were evidently seeing enough money that they decided it made sense to re-establish their own cartoon studio. So, DePatie-Freleng's contract was ended... and then I guess Warner Bros. realized they couldn't get their own studio up and running in time, as they hired Format Films to produce three more Daffy/Speedy cartoons to bridge the gap. Ironically, despite the mixed-at-best results on their earlier efforts, Format Films' Daffy/Speedy cartoons are easily their best Looney Tunes work, and arguably even the best entries overall in the series.

In the meantime, studio executive William L. Hendricks was assigned to head up the new animation studio. Hendricks was perhaps a curious choice, as his prior experience had mostly been in documentary production, including the Academy Award-winning A Force in Readiness. That being said, Hendricks also worked in the studio's advertising department and, more notably, was also the founder of the Toys for Tots charity, so I suppose the studio management thought he had his finger on the pulse of what younger people liked.

When it came to hiring a director, I've read that Hendricks tried to persuade Bob Clampett to come back after nearly a quarter of a century away. I'm not at all sure on the veracity of this (I've also read that it was actually Bob McKimson who Hendricks tried to hire, which seems a lot more plausible given that McKimson directed most of the Looney Tunes that DePatie-Freleng did in-house, and actually would join the new studio the following year), but if Clampett truly was in the running to come back, then it's probably for the best that he didn't take up the offer, as he would have seriously struggled to emulate the kind of no-holds-barred animation that he was known for during his original stint at Warner Bros. on the  diminished budget that would have been available to him in the late 1960s.

In any event, the person who Hendricks actually did hire as the studio's director was Alex Lovy, a veteran of the Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera studios. Lovy was a key figure in the histories of both those studios, helping with the development of Woody Woodpecker and directing (or co-directing with Lantz, depending on the source) his first short, and then working with Hanna-Barbera from the early 1960s until, aside from his brief stint at Warner Bros, shortly before his death in 1992. Similar to Hendricks, he was another curious choice given his relative lack of experience working on anything like Looney Tunes, but if Hendricks had already made up his mind to focus on new characters, the choice would probably make more sense.

Behind the scenes, a bigger change was afoot; Seven Arts Productions were about to acquire a controlling interest in Warner Bros., which would eventually lead to the studio being rebranded as Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. For the time being, however, the first three shorts would go out (mostly) with the old Warner Bros. branding, meaning that when when the first short from this new studio went out with the Sandy Dennis vehicle Up the Down Staircase in 1967, most viewers were probably unaware of how much things were going to change during what would turn out to be the final three years of Looney Tunes' original run...