I'm currently doing a deep dive into the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons.
I thought my "Golden Collection" was complete, but it's only some 500 or so shorts. They made 1000.
I don't happen to like the really old stuff and I'm horrified by some of the racist depictions that were considered "funny" at the time. I'm also running across a LOT of shorts that never ran on the shows I watched in the 70s on tv. I assume that the racism, alcholism, gun violence (there's a few horrible "funny" suicides that are truly jarring) and/or sexism in certain of the shorts (particularly those from the 40s) were deemed too "adult" to allow them on Saturday morning tv decades later.
Still, there's a lot to love once you filter out the worst of it. There are also a more than a few surprises to be noted in what I think of as "the good stuff" which makes up between half and two-thirds of the 1000 cartoons.
One BIG surprise was the number of times the various characters actually show up. The numbers are generally lower that I expected and in some cases truly, shockingly low.
Consider 1000 cartoon shorts. Now consider the global popularity of some of the characters. Just off the top of my head I figured the "main" lead characters would have more appearances that they actually do.
Bugs Bunny, the marquee character, appears in 163 or so. I didn't count and I'm getting that number from Google. I mean, that's lots of cartoons, but somehow you'd just expect that he'd been in more like 250 of them or so.
Porky Pig appears in 153 according to the Google box. He appears in a lot of the early stuff, when the characters were still finding their classic designs and voices, so in my "good stuff" list it's only about 125 or so.
Daffy Duck, 130. Like Porky, the early Daffy stuff is (to me) not really enjoyable, so again, more like 100 or so.
Sylvester? 103, including 3 that won Academy Awards.
From 1000 cartoons, those 4 characters account for the leads in about half of them. Not really a surprise, but I still find the totals lower than my Saturday morning cartoon memories would expect.
I was surprised by some of the numbers for other characters.
Elmer Fudd takes on Bugs or Daffy in 71 cartoons. That seems about right.
60 Tweety appearances seemed low, but considering Sylvester also faces off with Hippity-Hopper the baby kangaroo and Speedy Gonzales, it tracks.
Speaking of Speedy, he appears 58 times, which is higher than I would have thought. Based on how I remember the cartoons as a kid, I thought there was a LOT more Tweety than Speedy.
When I was a kid, we watched the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show. Considering he got second billing, it's kind of shocking to see that there were only 49 Road Runner cartoons. Wile E. Coyote shows up in 5 more where he's trying to catch Bugs and the same character design was used for "Ralph Wolf" in 7 shorts where he's up against Sam the Sheepdog.
Yosemite Sam only appeared in 33 cartoons. Can you believe that? Only 33 out of 1000 and yet he's one of the most beloved characters of the franchise, particularly among short-tempered fans and pick-up truck drivers, for some reason.
Foghorn Leghorn was in 29 cartoons. He wasn't a favourite of mine as a kid, so it seemed like he'd been in a lot more than that!
Now comes the truly stunning number.
The Tazmanian Devil. Insanely popular character, huge global recognition. He spun (see what I did there?) off into his own show in the 90s, is on shirts, cups, posters, bumper stickers and just about any other place you can print something.
Truly a mascot for the phrase "quality over quantity."
How many times do you think, in all those 1000 cartoons, did he show up?
Take a guess. If you don't Google it, you'll be wrong.
He's since showed up in more shorts and movies, but from that original 1930 to 1965 run of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, he was in five.
FIVE.
That just spun me out.
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