Who would do this? And why? Drew Magary would, was the thing, and was gonna, and I’d rather die than let his rankings speak for the site and wind up with history recording that the place where I work said “R&B/Soul” was the second-best Looney Tunes character of all time. So we turned it into a scientific-y group activity instead, to protect against Drew’s dumpster CHUD opinions.
We didn’t rank all of them, before you ask about Gossamer, the large red hair-monster made famous as Bugs Bunny’s antagonist in Hair-Raising Hare. That’s because expanding the list into every character who memorably appeared once or twice in a classic Looney Tunes or Merry Melodies cartoon could have resulted in an extremely long list, and many of the people who work here are not lunatics and therefore don’t necessarily know more than a handful of classic Warner Bros. cartoon characters without having to google them. (Also Barry kept claiming that, like, Jerry from Tom & Jerry and Scooby Doo and Morley Safer were Looney Tunes characters. He is from hell, and by God to hell I shall return him.) Also, in a couple of instances where characters are completely inseparable—Rocky and Mugsy, the mobster guys, and Hubie and Bertie, the extremely cute troublemaking mice—we ranked them as pairs.
Anyway, I made a spreadsheet with a bunch of characters from the golden age of Warner Bros. animation listed on it. Then a bunch of us went down the list and gave each character a score from zero (the lowest score) to 10 (the highest), or left the field blank for any characters they didn’t know. Then I totaled each character’s score, chopped off the lowest and highest, (to control for, for example, Drew rooting around in his asshole, pulling out a zero, and giving it to Porky Pig, who is adorable and hilarious and starred in some of the best cartoons ever made), averaged the result, and rounded it to the nearest hundredth.
What we ended up with is broadly fine, but also I have a hunch it functions as an index of how many of our house youths have watched Space Jam. (Sylvester got hosed.) It’s cucumber season, okay? I do not see a lot of urgent sports news around here to be blogged. Let’s just get this over with.
1. Bugs Bunny (10.0)
T-2. Daffy Duck (9.50)
T-2. Elmer Fudd (9.50)
4. Foghorn Leghorn (9.25)
5. Yosemite Sam (9.13)
6. Wile E. Coyote (8.88)
7. Porky Pig (7.50)
8. George P. Dog (7.17)
9. Rocky and Mugsy (7.0)
T-10. Sylvester (6.75)
T-10. Tasmanian Devil (6.75)
12. Pepé Le Pew (6.38)
13. Sam Sheepdog (6.17)
14. Hector the Bulldog (6.0)
15. Ralph Wolf (5.75)
T-16. Henery Hawk (5.67)
T-16. Witch Hazel (5.67)
18. Hubie and Bertie (5.60)
19. Michigan J. Frog (5.40)
20. Road Runner (5.25)
21. Marvin the Martian (5.0)
22. Tweety Bird (4.50)
23. Granny (4.17)
24. Speedy Gonzales (1.25)
This blog is over.