Elmer Fudd stripped of rifle in new Looney Toons cartoon series

Bugs Bunny plugs Elmer Fudd’s rifle with his fingers in a 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon
Warner Bros.

Warner Bros is stripping Elmer Fudd of his rifle in a new Looney Tunes cartoon series on HBO Max, handicapping the grumpy hunter as he continues his decades-long pursuit of the wise-cracking Bugs Bunny, according to reports.

The change in the latest incarnation of the iconic animated series is a response to the gun violence in the US, the Telegraph reported.

Historically the toons have largely revolved around Fudd’s persistent chase of the carrot-chomping Bug Bunny, with his classic catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?”

Fudd, known for his own catchphrase, “Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits,” gets outsmarted by Bugs at every turn, even though he’s always had his trusty shotgun at his side — until now.

“We’re not doing guns,” Peter Browngardt, executive producer of the new series, told the New York Times. “But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All of that was kind of grandfathered in.”

Fudd won’t be empty-handed, however — he’ll now use a scythe to try to bag Bugs

The 200 new cartoons, which will feature other Looney Toons “stars,” will still have an edge — Porky Pig sucks the poison out of Daffy Duck’s leg in one skit, Sylvester the Cat is haunted by the ghost of his traditional target, Tweety Bird, and Satan even makes a cameo in one toon.

“Some of them have maybe gone a little too far, so they might come out in a different format,” Browngardt told the outlet.

“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” he said. “Looney Toons is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”