HBO Max Removes Hundreds of ‘Looney Tunes’ Cartoons

HBO Max has removed a huge chunk of its Looney Tunes catalog without any explanation, to fans’ horror. The streamer removed Season 16 through Season 31 of the classic Looney Tunes shorts sometime this week – 256 out of the 511 episodes that were available. With all the big changes at HBO Max lately, this sudden change has fans on edge.

The fan-made Twitter account “Animation on HBO Max” alerted fans to the disappearance of Looney Tunes on Saturday, Dec. 31. There has been no official press release about this removal, as there were for some of the other cuts to the HBO Max library. The user who pointed this change out speculated that this was “a mistake” on HBO Max’s end, “because if it was on purpose they did not seem to have planned for it in advance.” As evidence for this theory, they pointed out that HBO Max still has a playlist called “Best of the 50s,” but after this removal, the only thing left on it is the Yogi Bear cartoon.

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The 256 shorts removed recently included all the ones HBO Max carried from the year 1951 onward. Looney Tunes debuted in 1930, originally intended as a way for Warner Bros. to compete with Walt Disney Animation. The cartoons evolved over time so that these days the original 1930s iterations would be practically unrecognizable to most fans. The 1950s era is easier to identify as a continuous production up to the modern day.

The status of the modern era of Looney Tunes is hard to discern, as HBO Max has been gutting its animation efforts in the last few months. The streamer has been making some huge changes since its parent company merged with Discovery Inc., forming Warner Bros. Discovery. The changes are all leading up to a planned convergence in the summer of 2023 when Discovery+ and HBO Max will merge into one big streaming platform.

It seems that animation will be a much smaller part of that platform than it was of HBO Max. When HBO Max launched in the spring of 2020, one of its major draws was the new Looney Tunes Cartoons series – 1,000 minutes of new shorts featuring beloved characters. The Looney Tunes characters starred in other movies and shorts during this brief resurgence – notably Space Jam: A New Legacy – but starting this spring the streamer began dropping animation projects left and right.

HBO Max has not officially explained the disappearance of half of its classic Looney Tunes catalog at the time of this writing. Seasons 1 through 15 are still available to stream.