How to Watch Looney Tunes Shorts Now That They Aren’t on Max
The only thing David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, loves more than making bottom feeding swill like Naked and Afraid and Dr. Pimple Popper and being a dick to Clint Eastwood is making it really hard to watch legitimately great TV—including timeless, iconic cultural institutions like the original Looney Tunes cartoons. Max—the WBD-owned streaming service that was known as HBO Max until tripe-merchant Zaslaz took over and decided the HBO name was too closely associated with quality—recently finished a job it started in 2022 and removed the rest of Warner Bros.’ classic animated shorts from its streaming lineup. If you pull up Max today and search for Looney Tunes (a brand synonymous with Warner Bros. that has endured for almost a century and given us some of the most famous pop culture characters ever) all you’ll find are series made in the last decade. None of the shorts made between 1930 and 1969—the cartoons that gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and so many others; the cartoons that generations have grown up watching—are still on there. The work of giants like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Friz Freleng are just wiped from public view. Mel Blanc, whose body of work in Warner Bros. cartoons, due to its scope and variety and flexibility, might legitimately be the most impressive acting oeuvre of all time, can’t be heard the way most people have heard him. The cartoons that gave Warner Bros. its identity, that were a vital part of the studio’s success for almost half a century, and that are so deeply rooted in American culture that many people today don’t even know they’re referencing a Looney Tunes cartoon when they quote one, are gone from the online home for Warner Bros. content. At least you can still stream nine seasons of something called Hoarding: Buried Alive, though.
Zaslav doesn’t just hate Bugs Bunny, of course. Since Discovery inexplicably took over Warner Bros. in 2022 the company has waged war against pretty much all of animation. They took down the Cartoon Network’s site, scrapped finished seasons of animated shows, cycled out so many Adult Swim originals (both live action and animated), and openly talk about deemphasizing “children’s” content, as if almost anything animated is exclusively for children. (The one exception to this animation vendetta seems to be shows related to DC Comics.) Even Sesame Street—whose new seasons never should’ve moved to HBO from PBS in the first place—has fallen prey to Zaslav’s kid-hating axe.
Removing Looney Tunes, though, is a whole different level of insanity. Bugs Bunny is one of the few fictional characters as recognizable across every generation as Mickey Mouse. These shorts have entertained audiences for several decades, and these characters remain beloved. The fact that the Zaslav-run Warner Bros. Discovery apparently has no idea how to make money off of them—and, indeed, apparently wants to wash their hands of them entirely—seems like the kind of fiduciary negligence that should incite a shareholders revolt.
Fortunately the general viewing audience doesn’t have to share in Max’s misery. There are still ways to watch some of those classic shorts. Here’s how.
For the time being you can still find a small selection of the classics on the YouTube page for Warner Bros. Classics. Sadly these compilation videos don’t seem to have many shorts in their entirety, instead chopping up highlights for videos with names like “Wile E. Coyote Takes on the Roadrunner Compilation” and “Bugs Bunny Classic Moments Compilation.” This is the best you’re going to get outside of buying physical media, though—at least officially.
Pickings are slim for physical copies, too, if you’re looking for HD versions. The Looney Tunes Collector’s Choice series of Blu-rays is great, thankfully; it doesn’t feature the most famous shorts (those were collected in the earlier Platinum Collection, whose Blu-rays are out of print), but its four volumes do have almost 100 hilarious cartoons from the series’ golden era, looking and sounding better than you’ve probably ever screen them before. You can often pick up all four volumes in a single package for a $40 or so.
If you want the truest classics, like “What’s Opera, Doc?” and “Duck Amuck” and “One Froggy Evening,” you’ll want the Platinum Collection. Sadly it’s out of print on Blu-ray, and copies of volumes 1 and 2 (which feature the best of the best) fetch three figures apiece on the second hand market. If you aren’t some rigid audio-visual snob, though, the collection was rereleased on DVD in 2023, and that version is plentiful and affordable—at least right now. Will there be a rush on ‘em now that it’s the only legal way to see a lot of this stuff? I guess we’ll find out.
It’s entirely possible there are less-than-legal ways to watch all of this. But as far as official releases go, the DVD rerelease of the Platinum Collection, the Blu-rays of the Collector’s Choice series, and the clips compiled on YouTube are the only way to go here.
A quick search on the major FAST networks (think Tubi and Pluto) turns up no Looney Tunes content at the moment. Tubi will be adding the 2011 series The Looney Tunes Show in April, but that’s a far cry from the original shorts. Disney hasn’t done a great job with its classic shorts over on Disney+, with only a relatively small selection available, but at least it does have almost 100 shorts from the ‘20s through ‘50s available—and added more as recently as the summer of 2023, after the first wave of Max’s Looney Tunes purge. Disney could be so much better at preserving its short-form heritage, but they’re at least doing something to make the best ones available; the Zaslav-run Warner Bros., meanwhile, seems embarrassed that it ever made cartoons in the first place.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.