Tubi is happy to have the Looney Tunes shorts Warner Bros. dumped

While it hasn't had any conversations to date, the streamer would be happy to license Coyote Vs. Acme, too.

By Emma Keates | October 24, 2025 | 4:45pm

Screenshot: Looney Tunes/Tubi

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Tubi is happy to have the Looney Tunes shorts Warner Bros. dumped

Finally, Looney Tunes has found a home that won’t put an anvil over its head whenever some shiny, new thing arrives. The classic cartoon was consistently mistreated under its Warner Bros. Discovery stewardship. Original films The Day The Earth Blew Up and Coyote Vs. Acme were both sloughed off to independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment (after WBD tried to cancel the latter entirely, drawing a major backlash from the animation community), and in March, the company pulled the classic Looney Tunes library from HBO Max entirely. That’s when Tubi stepped in. In August, the free, ad-supported streamer secured 789 classic Looney Tunes shorts that would otherwise have been locked in WBD’s vault for god knows how long. That’s every short the company would release—some 200 remain on WBD’s shelf due to “cultural sensitivities,” which Samuel Harowitz, Tubi’s head of acquisitions, told Vulture was “a Warner Bros. Discovery decision.” The shorts Tubi did acquire range from 1930s-era black and white cartoons to segments from the early ’90s.

“On its own, Looney Tunes is a huge win for us,” Harowitz said, sharing with the outlet that by total viewing time, Looney Tunes is in the top 10 best performing series on the streamer, popular with viewers of all ages. He also said that the company is in “active negotiations to ensure that Tubi can be the home of Looney Tunes for quite a while,” sharing that while “there have been no conversations to date,” it would be open to licensing future Looney Tunes content like Coyote Vs. Acme.

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Tubi seems to be making cartoons a priority. “Classic animation is one of the biggest fandoms that we serve on the platform,” Harowitz shared. In addition to Looney Tunes, Tubi also licenses classic shorts from Tom And Jerry, The Flintstones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and other Saturday-morning classics. For most of these shows (including Looney Tunes), the streamer sorts its acquisitions into roughly chronological “seasons,” segmented into 30-minute “episodes” containing three-or-so shorts apiece, with ads appearing only in-between segments—never in the middle of a story or punchline. This format is more reminiscent of the linear TV cartoon delivery system than HBO Max’s library, which allowed users to pick and choose just one sketch at a time. “In my mind, AVOD and FAST is ad-supported TV in a different candy wrapper,” Harowitz said. “I get to experience it through the eyes of my kids but also evoke the same emotional response I remember as an 8-year-old sitting in front of a CRT Toshiba TV.”

And that’s not all, folks! Tubi also made sure to use versions of many of the cartoons that had been restored for Warner Bros.’ Blu-ray and DVD collections before they were licensed. “I take delight when others tell me that they notice the difference… We were doing this for decades in order to now put this on television en masse,” said animation historian Jerry Beck, who worked on the physical releases. Now, he’s just happy other streamers are making the classic cartoons accessible. “In a way, I’m kind of glad that they took them off HBO Max and allowed other networks to use them,” he said, “so we can all see them.”