The Looney Tunes Have Found the Perfect New Home
The Looney Tunes are about to enter a new era. On Monday, it was announced that Turner Classic Movies will become the ongoing television home for the existing library of Looney Tunes shorts.
The library, which spans more than 750 shorts, will be actively programmed into TCM’s schedule beginning in February. The licensing deal will reportedly last for the next six years — a move that is encouraging in its own right, given how the fate of the network itself has been a subject of worry in recent years.
“TCM is excited to become the ongoing television home of the Looney Tunes library,” Charlie Tabesh, SVP, Programming and Content Strategy at Turner Classic Movies, said in a statement. “By making TCM an ongoing home for this iconic library, we’re able to present these cartoons with the care and they deserve, alongside the classic films they helped influence.”
This comes after hundreds of Looney Tunes shorts were taken off of the HBO Max streaming service in both 2022 and 2025, after the license to them had lapsed. (Some of these shorts have since been made available to stream for free on Tubi.)
Good for Bugs Bunny!
Eagle-eyed TCM fans (myself included) noticed that the network was adding Looney Tunes to their programming through their monthly schedule newsletter, which always includes a tease for the first week of the following month. The first week of February will see 45 different Bugs Bunny-centric shorts make their premiere on TCM. Bugs has even been crowned the network’s “Star of the Month”, an honor recently held by the likes of real-life actors Merle Oberon, Rock Hudson, and Angela Lansbury.
If that wasn’t enough, TCM’s first week of Bugs Bunny-related shorts will run alongside a curated selection of movies with similar theming. You can find a list of some of them (via The Hollywood Reporter) below:
- Rabbit of Seville (1950) and What’s Opera Doc (1957) with A Night at the Opera (1935)
- Tortoise Beats Hare (1941), Tortoise Wins by a Hare (1943) and Rabbit Transit (1947) with Walk, Don’t Run (1966)
- Apes of Wrath (1959) with King Kong (1933)
- Buccaneer Bunny (1948) with Mutiny on the Bounty (1950)
- Captain Hareblower (1954) with Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)
- Bugsy and Mugsy (1957) and The Unmentionables (1963) with The Roaring Twenties (1939)
- A Witch’s Tangled Hare (1959) with Hamlet (1948)
I am not being hyperbolic when I say that TCM is a major fixture in my life. The network is one of the few reasons why I still have a monthly cable subscription, instead of just fully migrating over to streaming services. Part of the joy of TCM is their approach to curation: seeing what themes are chosen for particular days, what double features are concocted that I never would have thought of, and what short things they program in between feature-length movies so they can usually start at the top of the hour.
That latter field can be a treasure trove of old parades and newsreels and a thirty-minute ode to Tupperware. And, honestly, it is an inspired choice to fold the Looney Tunes library into that. I can’t wait to catch the occasional classic short while waiting for the next film to start, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
(featured image: Max)
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