StaryStory

Definitely one of the cutest Coco drawings I've seen.

1969 was the last year when they regularly released cartoons, and then the studio was closed down (I plan to go through some of the later revivals, but the originals are the priority for me). I last posted the review for 1956, but I'm already watching the 1961 releases. At first, I published two reviews a week, but as the schedule grew and grew, I thought that was a bit too much – I'll probably start doing that again soon, as the 60s have fewer cartoons per year.

Wasn't aware about that story, makes a lot of sense and explains why I feel that there were less cartoons starting from the 60's, I think it's related to the evolution of the entertainment industry, with the rise of Television and all, happened to other golden era series as well such as Tom & Jerry, Felix The Cat etc, they stopped with the "theatrical format" and switched into the "serialized format", though I heard that they released two or three more animations in the classic format in the 90's, but I'm not sure about it

Even the WB studio started doing some TV work. I'll try to cover that in my blog, but that's one area where I can't make it anywhere near complete.  "The Bugs Bunny Show" (with new hosting segments between the old cartoons) had 52 episodes, but I've only been able to find 13 (almost?) full ones, though there are various clips available from the others (they cut the negatives to reuse some of the footage for later shows and apparently threw away the rest, making it really hard to find).

There was another effect TV had on the theatrical cartoons – as they were now showing the older cartoons on TV, they started taking that into account when making new ones for theaters. Why did Bugs Bunny disappear all of a sudden? They had enough cartoons with him to show on TV, so they decided to focus on the characters that had less of them. And for the cartoons that were still being shown in theaters, reissues were sometimes just as popular as new ones. Disney, MGM and Paramount had all given up on cartoon shorts by the time the last Looney Tunes came out. Walter Lantz (Universal) had a couple more years left, while DePatie-Freleng (United Artists) somehow lasted until 1980 with the Pink Panther cartoons (though the last ones were shown on TV before theaters), but pretty much everything else they tried flopped.

Yeah, there have been a few short-lived theatrical revivals of the Looney Tunes – the Greg Ford and Terry Lennon shorts in the late 80s and early 90s, Chuck Jones Film Productions later in the 90s, but never a full schedule like in the old days (just a couple of shorts a year at most). The last time they tried was in 2003 with Larry Doyle producing, but that was a disaster (in the end, they were just released on DVD, most of them only in Australia).