Updated on December 10, 2021
A new episode of “The Looney Tunes Show.” This one’s better than last week’s, but don’t expect much humor here—oddly, this one has more emphasis on action/adventure than humor (or rather, the sitcom-style humor of this show). SPOILERS below.
Plot: A charity bachelor’s auction run by Porky sees Bugs “won” by Lola, who takes him on her 24-hour date to Paris. Meanwhile, Daffy is “won” (for “two bits”) by Granny, who regales him with a tale of how she was a spy during World War II.
Lola makes her return in this episode (apparently newly divorced, separated and/or forgotten that she’s married to Pepe Le Pew). While she’s still somewhat annoying, it’s probably less so than Lola was in her debut episode.
Positive episode aspects:
- Porky’s running of the auction, especially when it came time to try to unload Daffy. (Meanwhile, Bugs is popular enough that two women wind up fighting over the right to bid on him…)
- The subplot of Granny in World War II was more entertaining than the “main” Bugs/Lola plot. We see Granny in flashback as a young woman during the war (ignoring her original shorts where she’s already an elderly woman, of course… fun with sliding timelines!), working as a spy and battling art-stealing Nazis. Oddly, young-Granny looked an awful lot like Daphne from “Scooby-Doo.”
- Tying into the Granny plot, the ending with Sylvester and Tweety was one of the funniest moments of the episode. Similar to Yosemite Sam and the Goofy Gophers a few episodes back, we see Sylvester call out Tweety on this (particularly his age). We also get a joke about Tweety’s gender. Here, it’s played ambiguously, versus the same joke’s use in the 90s series “Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries,” where Tweety was much more dismissive at the idea of people thinking he’s a girl.
- The sequence where we see the Allies desperate for any type of bird as a carrier pigeon (that poor penguin…).
Other observations:
- No Nazi swastikas (just World War I-style iron crosses) on the German flags during the World War II sequences, for obvious reasons.
- Granny notes she’s “90 years old,” which roughly matches the age of her voice actress, June Foray (age 93).
- They apparently dropped the “Granny’s hard of hearing” joke from her appearance in “Devil Dog.”
- Not the first time Granny’s whacked Daffy upside the head—she did it in at least one original series short (1955’s “This Is a Life?“).
No Merrie Melodie this week, but we do get a CGI Road Runner short. This week sees the Coyote (reminiscent of 1979’s “Freeze Frame” and a few original series shorts) spray the desert with snow, then try to catch his prey while wearing a speed skater’s outfit.
