That's all, folks: 'Looney Tunes' bans guns, Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam put down firearms

That's all for rifles and pistols, folks

Elmer Fudd typically was armed with a rifle in original episodes of 'Looney Tunes'

They are known for chasing down some of TV's most adorable cartoon characters armed with gunpowder, anvils and, most notably, an array of firearms.

But the arsenal of Looney Tunes' most infamous hunters has been reduced in a reboot of the animation company's shows.

New episodes of Looney Tunes cartoons, featuring familiar faces such as Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird and Daffy Duck, are now streaming on HBO Max in the US, but you won't see any guns on screen.

The villainous Elmer Fudd, the rifle-handed arch nemesis of everyone's favourite rabbit, and Yosemite Sam, another of Bugs's adversaries, have been stripped of their firearms in the reboots, in response to continued gun violence in the US.

"We're not doing guns," showrunner and executive producer Peter Browngardt told The New York Times. "But we can do cartoony violence – TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in."

However, that doesn't mean there won't be any weapons on hand, with Fudd now hunting down "wabbits" armed with a scythe.

“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” Browngardt said.

"Looney Tunes is pretty much the antithesis of that. It's two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.

"I always thought, 'What if Warner Bros had never stopped making Looney Tunes cartoons'? As much as we possibly could, we treated the production in that way."

The Looney Tunes series was launched in 1930, originally running as shorts screened before films in cinemas before moving to TV.

They introduced characters including Sylvester the Cat, Marvin the Martian, Tasmanian Devil, Road Runner and Wile E Coyote to audiences, with the franchise spawning films, comic books, merchandise, theme park rides and video games.

The reboots, which span between one and six minutes, are not the only cartoons that haven't necessarily aged well.

When Disney+ launched in the US in November 2019, the streaming platform added a warning on some of its children's films, advising viewers that the content "may contain outdated cultural depictions".

The warning can be found on movies including Dumbo, Fantasia, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book.