“The Bugs Bunny Show's ”Move From Primetime to Saturday Mornings Captivated an Unexpected Audience

The Bugs Bunny Show was a landmark moment in animation, for the industry and viewers.

The animated series hosted by the beloved Looney Tunes character debuted on ABC as a half-hour primetime program on Oct. 11, 1960. It was the first national broadcast television series for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters.

While the show fared well in the timeslot, things changed in Aug. 1962, when ABC began to re-run episodes as part of their Saturday morning block.

Saturday morning cartoons were a major part of childhood for kids growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only that, but airing the animations during this timeslot and in syndication in the years that followed allowed new audiences to get to know beloved Looney Tunes characters.

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All 52 episodes of The Bugs Bunny Show originally aired in black and white. In 1966, as color television became more widespread throughout the United States, syndicated episodes began to appear in color.

By September 1967, the show had moved to Sunday mornings for its duration. The show would bounce back and forth between ABC and CBS for many years.

Despite the fact that the shorts, combined into half-hour blocks, were beloved by kids, they weren’t created with children in mind. The Warner Bros. cartoons were envisioned to appear between coming attractions and a film in theaters.

In an interview with the Television Academy, animator Chuck Jones said that he worried that in editing the shorts for television, network executives would “strike at a child’s credibility.”

“They would strike at a child’s credibility, that the sense of rationality. They would show somebody coming up with a gun and then they’d show what happened afterward, but they wouldn’t see the gun going off. And of course, I never ever shot anybody to kill. I mean, Daffy Duck’s bill would go around and around or something like that. People ask why I did that. I said, ‘I did it because I thought it was funny.’ That’s why,” he shared.

“I didn’t put anything in there unless it contributed to the story or had some fun with it. That’s what was our business. What’s making people laugh? We knew that we were not making pictures for children, because our pictures were made solely for theatrical release. They were always made for theatrical release, right up to 63. None of them were made for television.”

While it sounds unthinkable that these shorts weren’t designed with TV in mind, “it was for a perfectly good, maybe a logical reason for it, because there wasn’t any television. And therefore we couldn’t make things for something that hadn’t existed.”

“We tried to make pictures to make the audiences laugh, and since we didn’t know what that audience was — we certainly were sure that every audience was not composed solely of children — and because we were so young and we had very recently left our parents and our teachers, very little respect for adults, so we ended up where every person, every creative, you try to draw for yourself. And then you try to do what we figured, that if we made each other laugh, hoping for the audience at home, and it turns out they did.”