Hundreds Of Classic Looney Tunes Have A New Streaming Home (For Now)

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Warner Bros. animation studio — nicknamed the Termite Terrace, after the ramshackle buildings that the animators worked out of — produced over 1,000 shorts films under the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies banners. Many animation historians can speak endlessly about the creative team who came out of the Termite Terrace and how their comedic language came to influence just about every facet of filmmaking and comedy. Producer Leon Schelsinger was the mastermind, and many of the WB directors brought a different comedic angle to the material. Tex Avery was the gag man. Bob Clampett was the madman. Friz Freleng was the placid character guy. Robert McKimson was the aggressive character guy. Carl Stalling was the master musician. Chuck Jones was the master of everything.

Thanks to the gods of Saturday morning, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies have been enjoyed by multiple generations, arranged in extensive animation blocks on network TV and then, later, on animation cable networks. Thanks to their continued ubiquity, the Looney Tunes have taught millions of kids opera references, 1930s Hollywood caricatures, and the hilarity of dynamite and anvils. Everyone now knows pieces of music like "Power House." The Looney Tunes are a vital part of American culture.

Sadly, those animation collections were never complete, usually relegated to certain blocks of the Termite Terrace's output. It wasn't until the days of DVDs that complete Looney Tunes collections would be made available to the public. When HBO Max launched, the programmers loaded up the service with many Looney Tunes shorts from throughout the studio's history, but they've unfortunately been largely removed from the service, leaving fans to find other means of tracking them down.

As of today, though, the stalwart (and free) streaming service Tubi has picked up the slack. A whopping 786 of the Looney Tunes can now be watched instantly, right now, on their channel. It's okay. The boss isn't looking. Go ahead and watch a few at work right now. 

Tubi has arranged their new Looney Tunes collection in a curious way. Rather than just have a long list of shorts by title, they have grouped them into clusters of three or five, arranged in order of their release. The Looney Tunes are presented as a TV series that lasted for one season and 262 episodes. 

The first episode is a grouping of "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile" "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!," and "A Great Big Bunch of You," all three directed by Rudolph Ising, and from 1931 and 1932. The final episode comes very much up to the present, and boasts a grouping of Bret Haaland's "The Whizzard of Ow" (2003), as well as Dan Pvenmire's "My Generation G-G-Gap," Peter Shin's "Cock-A-Doodle-Duel," Povenmire's "Museum Scream," and Rich Moore's "Attack of the Drones" (all from 2004). 

Each "episode" runs anywhere from 21 to 35 minutes, which may be the best way to consume Looney Tunes shorts. They're too funny and complex to marathon through, so small confections may be more amenable to a modern attention span. 

Because of the aforementioned Saturday morning TV cartoon blocks, many modern audiences are likely more familiar with the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck shorts from the '40s to the mid-'50s, like "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" seen above. As such, one might not see some of the more familiar Looney Tunes faces until about episode 52, the cluster that includes Tex Avery's "A Wild Hare" (1940). It will also be interesting going through the Looney Tunes in historical order to see the way the animation evolved in fits. They went back and forth, for instance, on the use of color.

Warner Bros. has been, as many know, undergoing a massive identity crisis in recent years. David Zaslav was appointed CEO of the company, and his slash-and-burn approach to saving the company money has been baffling and hurtful. He has famously shelved movies to acquire tax write-offs, and sold off various hot WB properties to other companies; the recent "Batman: Caped Crusader," an excellent show, ran on Prime Video. The Looney Tunes have been WB's longest-running and most lucrative property, but it was confusing that they didn't offer a full catalogue of shorts on HBO Max (WB's streaming service) in perpetuity.

In 2020, many Looney Tunes were made available on HBO Max, although the company had to cheap out on restorations, leading to some dubious and inauthentic tinkering (mostly to opening title sequences and the like) that true animation fans noticed right away. In 2022, however, WB inexplicably removed 256 Looney Tunes shorts from HBO Max without an announcement. When pressed, WB said (as reported by Vulture) that the culling was done because the licensing agreements for the shorts had expired and WB didn't want to renew them. The Looney Tunes collection on HBO Max only fluctuated from there. 

Fans on Twitter kept a close eye on the total number of Looney Tunes on HBO Max, noting that 256 shorts were added back in September of 2024. In March of 2025, however, the classic Looney Tunes shorts were removed from HBO Max altogether, which was an act of cultural vandalism. However, the more recent movie, "The Day the Earth Blew Up," is still on HBO Max.

The Fox-owned Tubi has thankfully stepped in and now offers a Looney Tunes collection larger than anything HBO Max ever had. All that classics are there, as are hundreds of obscurities. If Warner Bros. doesn't want to show Looney Tunes to us, we'll sure as heck go to the service that does.