The Looney Tunes Disappear from their Home Streaming Service

There’s a hole in the bottom of the HBOMax content library, and who knows what will disappear into the abyss before it gets plugged. For now, Looney Tunes are moving and they might not be “that’s all, folks.”

If you haven’t been following That Park Place, you might not know that large swaths of the HBOMax catalogue have been going dark. Decades of Sesame Street have gone missing. Shows that were specifically commissioned for HBOMax are nowhere to be found. Even prestige content like HBO’s Westworld are no longer on the platform. Westworld cost somewhere between $100 – $150 million a season to produce, and with four seasons so far that’s easily more than half a billion dollars worth of sunk costs just sitting there doing nothing, unavailable for anyone to watch on HBOMax.

HBO Max has quietly removed over 250 Looney Tunes episodes in the streamer's latest content purge.https://t.co/2qWPSDMY5a pic.twitter.com/ND1m40Jc5a

— Screen Rant (@screenrant) January 2, 2023

Thanks to a tweet from Twitter user @AnimationonMax, we now know that the Looney Tunes are also falling victim to this change. When HBOMax launched in May of 2020, there were more than 470 Looney Tunes shorts on the service, organized into 31 different “seasons.” If you look on HBOMax today, you will only find 255 Looney Tunes shorts remaining on the service, with every cartoon short released after season 16 (circa 1951) nowhere to be found. That’s more than two hundred pieces of content pulled without any public acknowledgement from Warner Bros.

Seasons 16 through 31 of the classic "LOONEY TUNES" shorts on HBO Max have mysteriously vanished. This removes 256 of the previously 511 available shorts, mostly from the year 1951 onward. pic.twitter.com/CFbQxCSsD9

— Animation on Max (@AnimationOnMax) December 31, 2022

Looney Tunes (and its sister series Merrie Melodies) premiered in 1930. The original list of shorts on HBOMax seemed comprehensive, even going back to the black and white Bosko days where some of the characters bore an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It is of course notable that the title Merrie Melodies is also a play off of Silly Symphonies, the Walt Disney Company’s original series. Disney of course was no stranger to overt “homage” in that their Steamboat Willie was a play off of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.

If it were the monchrome Bosko cartoons that disappeared, it might be chalked up to Warner Bros Discovery tidying up their archival content to quietly get rid of cartoons that could potentially problematic to modern sensibilities. The early Bosko characterizations are widely considered to be plays on racial stereotypes of southern black people. A few articles from an unfriendly member of the media pointing out that resemblance could land HBOMax in hot water.

However, it is the more recent (and likely more marketable) Looney Tunes shorts that were pulled from the service. It is also unlikely that this content, which has been owned by Warner Bros outright for decades) was costing them anything more than server space. It would not be unreasonable to think that the Looney Tunes are bound for Warner Bros Discovery’s new Free Ad-Supported streaming product, which Zaslav has stated will be releasing in Spring of 2023.

Looney Tunes, with its deep library of entertaining children’s content, is probably bound to the same fate as WBD’s Sesame Street. In our previous coverage on the topic, we’ve pointed out the economic advantages that vast libraries of acceptable kid’s entertainment present to streamers. Instead of receiving a single monthly subscription payment for a household full of users, if a streamer can put that same content on an ad-supported platform their revenue will scale according to watch minutes.

The disappearance of content at HBOMax is an ongoing situation with new revelations every few days. If you want to stay up-to-date, be sure to bookmark That Park Place and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

If you had to guess, what is the next HBOMax show that will go quietly into the night?