The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour
Series, 1968, Saturday mornings, Set in The shorts on TV
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour is #2 of 18 in release order and #2 of 18 in chronological order in the Looney Tunes.
The story
Bugs Bunny and all his cartoon friends are stage performers entertaining audiences with 7 features per show, all of which are classic theatrical cartoons from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour recap
An hour-long Saturday morning show on CBS built from the classic theatrical shorts, hosted by Bugs Bunny with Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons alongside his own. It grew out of The Bugs Bunny Show, which began in prime time on ABC in 1960 with three shorts per episode joined by newly animated linking scenes of Bugs and the cast introducing them, and The Road Runner Show, which CBS had aired since 1966. CBS merged the two in 1968. Over the next three decades the package moved between CBS and ABC and kept changing names and lengths: The Bugs Bunny Show again, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, The Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes Comedy Hour and The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. For many viewers it was where they first saw the shorts. Networks trimmed violent gags and scenes considered offensive, and some cartoons were left out entirely, so the versions shown on TV often differed from the theatrical originals.
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour ending explained
The show had no finale. Its final form, The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show on ABC, ended on September 2, 2000, after Warner Bros. made the Looney Tunes library exclusive to its own cable channels, Cartoon Network and later Boomerang. That closed a run of about forty years for Bugs Bunny on network TV. The classic shorts did not return to American broadcast TV until 2021, when MeTV began airing them.
Ratings
IMDb 8.5/10
Where it fits
- Release order: after Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, before The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie.
- Chronological order: after Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, before The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie.
What to watch before The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (1930), which The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour (1968) continues.