Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones / Remembering singer Cassandra Wilson

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Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Biancooley. At this point, the Looney Tunes cartoon franchise has been around for almost a century. Warner Brothers launched the first cartoon under that name in 1930 and spent the next several decades supplying cinemas and then television with animated shorts that delighted adults as well as kids.

The animators, who over the years included Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Fritz Freeling, and Chuck Jones, were brilliantly funny. So was Mel Blank, who provided the voices for almost all of the characters, from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Elmer Fudd and Pepe Lepew. Composer Carl Stalling supplied the memorable music for many episodes, and the combined canon included such nineteen fifties classics as The Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc?, both of which were directed by Jones, with music by Stalling and Voices by Blank. These cartoons and characters were widely adored by several generations, including mine. A streak of anarchy and a lot of violence ran through most of them.

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