Baby Looney Tunes review - s1ep1a (Taz in Toyland)
Hello and welcome to my review. Just to let you know, this
review is not intended for kids as it may include adult language and adult or dark discussion at times.
Now before we get to the main review, I have to explain something about the structure of what this show considers an episode. Each episode consists of 2 individual stories with a song in the middle. Despite each story having its own title, both of these stories are considered episode 1. This is why I have labelled this as episode 1a as
this is a review of specifically the first story in this episode. The second story I will call 1b. It just makes this easier to understand. With that said let's begin.
First we are gonna cover the PLOT of the episode and I will go on tangents along the way. Then later, I will elaborate on some other things.
This episode starts with the baby looney's each playing with their own toys in a different area of the room. The cringe starts early as we are only half a minute in and already Tweety is shown laughing at their own reflection in a hand mirror like its the best thing ever with cheesy sound effects every time they move their head up to the mirror. Better get used to those sound effects coz they NEVER STOP!
After talking to a friend, apparently this is meant to be a joke about what canaries do which is the species of bird he is supposed to be. Yes apparently they are a he. For years I thought they were a she but oh well. -v-' Am I the only one who thought this? Anyways, that's besides the point.
What I want to mention here is wtf is the point in having a joke about the species of bird they are here? This is a pretty specific joke at the best of times let alone a show I presume is targeted to toddlers but we will speak more about the target audience later as that is its own tangent. The cat jokes for Selvester make more sense coz the first animals kids learn about is cats and dogs so they might get those but this joke is only going to make sense to someone who owns a pet bird. This is an odd choice for the FIRST joke in this show but oh well I guess we moving on.
(this screenshot is from part 2 but it shows all the characters at the same time to prove my point)
Another weird thing you might notice here is for some reason they decided that all the baby main characters would have diapers EXCEPT Tweety and Taz and I have no fucking idea why. This just confuses me coz it proves they COULD have made them all have no pants or all have diapers but instead they went with this for reasons. You'd think it might be because Tweety is the least humanoid character and they didn't want to show humanoid characters with no pants but then why no diaper at all and why not one on Taz? Do they just shit on the floor and get a pass? When you watch the intro to the show they have different characters without diapers as well and the promotional art is all over the place. Someone explain this to me please! Anyways, I am getting too hung up on general stuff here, let's move onto the actual episode shall we?
So we see all the kids playing and eventually we get to Taz who is shown playing with a toy car. He then drives it across the floor as one would expect to do with a toy car and it crashes into a large piece of furniture and breaks. This has got to be the flimsiest toy car ever. Who gives a toddler, let alone one like Taz, a toy that easy to break?
Then Taz cries like the baby he is and Granny comes in to see what's wrong. He shows her the broken off wheel of the car and she turns to see the crushed car shell as well. Taz is apparently non verbal in this show which is better than him being voiced tbf but leaves some questions I will discuss later. But instead of Granny conceding she needs to go to a better toy store she instead chastises the literal toddler for breaking all his toys. Somehow this is Taz's fault. And here we see where this episode moral is going.
Good luck teaching literal TODDLERS to be more careful with their toys! They are young enough they shouldn't even be given toys with small parts to break anyway coz they will eat them! We are off to a fucking great start when the entire premise of the very first episode makes no fucking sense and has shown terrible parenting from the parental figure in the show. Also she keeps leaving the room and leaving a room full of toddlers with toys alone is also a terrible parenting idea although at least that makes sense coz nothing would happen if they were accompanied all the time.
So Granny says she needs to give Taz a toy that is not so easy to break. Wow fucking genius idea Granny. Maybe you should have thought of that 10 toys ago! No seriously look at the pile of broken toys he just has inexplicably lying in the corner here.
So she says she has just the thing and hands Taz a new toy. She makes Taz promise to be careful with the toy before leaving him alone again. Great idea Granny coz that worked so well the other 10 times didn't it? If you have had one of these toys before you can probably see where this is going coz it is recognizable as a specific type of toy.
So poor Taz tries really hard through the rest of the episode to keep this toy safe. He even barricades himself inside a block castle with a keep out sign. Forgetting the fact it then later mentions they don't know their letters so how the fuck did he know what the sign was for but anyways.
Then Tweety is seen playing with Selvester a game of pretend with Selvester as the baby and Tweety as the parent but they are already babies so wtf even is this? There is a joke here about baby food tasting terrible here which again makes no sense coz THEY ARE BABIES!
So Tweety forces Selvester to eat it and Selvester ends up chasing Tweety. Then Tweety is an asshole and sneaks into the castle fort despite the sign when he knows he is being chased by Selvester and so Selvester crashes into the castle and destroys it. Taz is worried about the toy but it is fine.
Then Bugs and Daffy encourage (more like demand) Taz play crash with their toy cars with his new toy inside the back of the dump truck toy Bugs has. They are literally goading him to break his new toy. When Taz says no which is fair enough they keep pressuring him so he feels forced to take action to escape the problem. Taz sees a bookshelf and decides to climb up it to escape them.
Then we have a King Kong reference coz of course. A pop culture reference so old that probably not even the parents watching the show with their kids would get it. So Taz leaves his toy up there and then climbs down again. Then Tweety crashes into Taz which bumps the bookshelf behind him and the toy falls on the ground. The toy falls into pieces.
Poor Taz tried so hard only to fail at something which wasn't even his fault in the end and was too young to be expected to deal with in the first place. He cries and Granny comes in. Granny then laughs at the toddler for being not smart enough to tell the toy isn't actually broken but its a toy which is designed to fall apart when the button at the bottom is pressed and come back together when you let go. Did any of you have one of these as a kid? I did so I know exactly what this is. They can still break it btw. I did lol. They easily get stuck in weird positions after a while and get tangled. But on another note wtf Granny?! You know Taz gets upset when toys break so you decided to give him a toy which pretends to break just to make him cry and then laugh at him later? wtf.
Yep so in summary of the plot, Taz keeps breaking his toys by playing too rough apparently so Granny gives him a toy which is designed to break and doesn't tell him but instead makes him promise to be careful and not break it. Then through no fault of his own the toy falls apart and Granny just laughs at him. The end. wtf are we supposed to learn from that?
MORALS and TARGET AUDIENCE
This show, like a lot of shows for young kids, focuses on moral problems and little life lessons which a kid might find useful so now we are going to talk about the moral of this story.
I guess the moral is supposed to be "be careful with your toys or they will break" but as I have already mentioned, the kids who would supposedly watch this show would be too young for this lesson. You really expect a kid who is young enough to need warnings of not to eat small parts on toys to be careful with their toys? No of course not.
And this outlines a big problem with this show which you might have noticed by now. Time to have a talk about the target audience of this show. I have to ask a burning question. WTF IS the target audience here?! They are babies so you would think the audience would be something similar since they often have main characters a similar
age to the target audience to make them relatable to the audience. However, these "babies" don't act like babies or even toddlers at all. They instead fill all the 10 year old tropes instead. So the show is for kids of that age?
Well, if it is it fails miserably coz it is so bare bones and basically the equivalent of shaking keys at a child and that isn't enough for a kid that old. There is no way they would care about the tiny issues of the day to day lives of these babies or the moral lessons they are
teaching here as they are long past those at this point and yet the lesson here is too much to expect very young kids to get anything out of either. This leaves the shows main moral completely useless. This wouldn't be too much of an issue if the show was at least harmless so it would be a worthy distraction for a young child but…
Unfortunately, the episode ends up teaching BAD lessons on top of this. Examples such as, teaching kids its ok to climb large pieces of furniture. I don't think I need to tell you why that is dangerous to teach young kids. Then there is the way Taz's supposed "friends" try to force him to do something he doesn't want to and don't
respect his boundaries and wishes in any way in this episode. Maybe a little much to learn for young kids but it certainly doesn't help showing this bad behavior from these characters we are supposed to support. Let alone the actions of Granny who is supposed to the role model here, teasing the poor child for no reason and punishing
him for something which isn't his fault.
This means that letting your young child watch this show would actually be MORE dangerous than not watching it. I don't think you could get any worse in a kids show than that.
One more thing of note to discuss about the target audience is how weird it is having a "baby" looney tunes show in the first place. Looney Tunes is a very old franchise so any kids or even the adults of kids this young will probably be too young to even know who any of these characters are which brings to question what even is the point
in using these characters. If anything it is just confusing. Although this isn't much of an issue in this show as the origins of the characters doesn't have much relevance to anything in the show in the first place other than a few quick references here and there for no reason. It shows just how much of a cash grab this show is that you
could literally replace these characters with anyone else and it wouldn't matter one bit.
Animation, Sound Design and Voice Acting etc
Now to talk about the animation, voice acting and other such junk. There isn't much to say here. The voice acting is decent for a show like this and not annoying thank goodness. I think that is to be expected tho since Warner Bros have plenty of money and resources to pull for this. I do especially like Grannies voice personally, she sounds so calm and wise like a Granny should (despite how she acts in this episode).
The animation however is as lazy as you can get. It's pretty obvious they churned this out quick with no regard to make it move nicely. However, due to it being for young kids and having slapstick style humour often considering it is using looney tunes characters; this doesn't affect the show too much tbh. There can be many animation errors tho and continuity errors considering the lack of effort tho and kids don't deserve something this lazy just because they can get away with it. There are plenty of other better animated shows for the same age range so it doesn't have much of an excuse.
The backgrounds are in a watercolour painting style which actually looks pretty nice but unfortunately this makes the plain flat coloured cartoon characters stand out even more in a jaring and garish way like they don't belong. It looks like a cheap drawing like a clip art slapped on a nice piece of artwork.
And the sound design, HO BOY the sound design! There is constant silly sound effects and it gets annoying very quick. It's understandable to some extent tho since this is again a looney tunes cartoon with slapstick humour and that is the style of that. This is also supposedly for young kids so this kinda thing will keep them engaged but yet again, just coz it is the basic way to get a kids attention doesn't mean they couldn't do better. This is the most basic ticking of the box you can get for a cartoon like this.
The music is actually not too bad. it's a shame it is hard to hear over all the silly sound effects because it goes up and down in a classic music style similar to the old looney tunes cartoons so it is fitting. It seems to be the only thing they did right here. Lord knows if anyone can get it right it should be looney tunes.
So in conclusion. What did we learn today kids? Climbing large furniture is apparently fine and dandy. Your friends are assholes and wont accept your wishes or boundaries when you want them to and Granny is also a troll. We learned nothing of value today. Fantastic. Add that to actually potentially teaching dangerous and bad habits to young kids and just the laziest animation possible and you have one of the worst kids shows I have ever seen.
Some people might think I am being too harsh and this is harmless but I have no tolerance for shows which teach bad morals to young kids. Make of it what you will.
I give this show a score of 2/10
It is not the worst I have seen but considering the young audience it isn't far from it.
Although this episode covers a lot of the show in general, you can't judge a show by just 1 episode. Especially what is technically the pilot episode of the series. So I am going to review more of this show later. However, of course, I have already covered overall things like animation and voice acting which wont change much from episode to episode so I won't mention those things again unless something changes or is relevant to that episode for some reason. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this review. Have a good day people and remember to stay hydrated and have a break from time to time :3 <3
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