It’s time for all of us to get a little looney with the latest LEGO collectible minifigures with the Looney Tunes characters. There are 12 minifigures to collect in all. The characters range from well known stars that you’ll be thrilled to bring home to a few that make you scratch your head in puzzlement.
In this series you’ll find Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Lola Bunny, Petunia Pig, Wile E Coyote, Road Runner, the Tasmanian Devil, Speedy Gonzales, Tweety Bird, Sylvester, and Marvin the Martian.
The case contains 36 blind bags. Each case is supposed to have one complete set, however both cases I received were missing Wile E Coyote. I have heard that other reviewers are missing Wile as well. I’m actually pretty bummed since I had some scenes I really wanted to do for Wile E Coyote.
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny comes with his trademark carrot. His head is dual molded, with white and grey plastic instead of painted white over the darker grey. It photographs much better when they use dual molding instead of paint over large areas.
All the details of his mouth are printed, with no sculpting, which detracts from character accuracy. While his face looks correct from the front, from the side the sculpt looks incomplete. Since he has an open mouthed smile, his jaw should jut out. His teeth and mouth could use some sculpting as well.
Overall I like this minifigure quite a bit, but it has room for improvement.
Daffy Duck
Our salty bird, Daffy, is one of my favorites out of this minifigure series. He comes with a printed sign that declares that it is rabbit season. Sorry, Daffy, we all know it’s duck season.
His head is tri-molded and fully sculpted, which looks great from any direction. His legs are dual molded. Daffy has a ducktail waist accessory, I only wish they made a rabbit tail for Bugs too.
Daffy is a great minifigure, I wish all of them were this quality.
Porky Pig
Poor Porky. The pig with the unfortunate name suffers from character accuracy problems. Some of you might remember that I come from a background as an animator.
Getting face proportions wrong can make a recognizable character look strange. Something went awry between sculpting Porky’s head to printing it. The mouth seems to have shrunk so it is much too narrow, no longer meeting the edges of the sculpted cheeks.
If it wasn’t for the face printing, Porky would’ve been a great minifigure. He has a printed sign with his catchphrase, “That’s all folks!” and his head sculpt, body proportions, and body print are all good. Just photograph him from his only good side, his backside.
Porky is one of my least favorites from this series.
Petunia Pig
I have to admit, I had to look up this character’s name. Considering how many Looney Tunes films I’ve watched, I wonder how I managed to miss this character entirely.
Petunia first appeared in “Porky’s Romance” in 1937. Petunia’s minifigure has the same positives and negatives as Porky. Her sculpt is actually pretty great, but the face print makes her look strange.
One of the benefits of not remembering this character at all is that her face doesn’t bother me as much. I’m pretty amused with a pig having pig-tails. She has a red skirt and comes with a tea set, which are all handy accessories to use for different scenes.
I’m pretty indifferent to this minifigure, and I wonder why they didn’t choose Granny instead, for a female character.
Lola Bunny
Lola first appeared in 1996 in “Space Jam”. This athletic bunny comes with a basketball and wears sports clothes. She shares the same positives and negatives as Bugs as a minifigure.
Her head is dual molded white and light brown. Her hair and hair-tie are painted. Since her smile is printed and not sculpted, she only looks character accurate from the front. Lola could benefit from more sculpting for her mouth.
Overall, I like this minifigure ok but she has room for improvement.
Road Runner
Road Runner has been significantly altered so that he can be a minifigure. Rather than a bird with long skinny legs and a long flexible neck, Road Runner has been anthropomorphized into a humanoid bird.
His head is tri-molded with blue, white, and yellow plastic. The head sculpt itself is very well done, and retains accuracy in all directions. His head feathers and long sweeping tail are both separate pieces. In case he gets hungry from running around in the middle of a desert, he comes with a bowl with food as an accessory.
Despite this being completely different from his character model, I actually like this minifigure version of Road Runner and feel this humanoid version of Road Runner retains much of his personality. Since his body is significantly altered from what’s recognizable, though, I anticipate many fans of this character may be sorely disappointed. This is one character that probably should have a custom body.
Tasmanian Devil
The voracious Taz comes with a drumstick and a pie to sate his appetite. He also has a printed disk representing the whirlwind that appears when he’s in motion. His dual molded head is made of dark brown and tan sculpted plastic.
He’s very character accurate from the front, though not as much from the side. The interior of his mouth and eyes are all printed.
I’m a little ambivalent about his face. The area around his mouth is nicely molded, so it’s a little surprising that his teeth aren’t molded too.
His face print is very different from any other minifigure I’ve encountered, with bold black lines around his eyes and teeth. He’ll photograph quite well from the front and from ¾ view, but from the side, he looks a little off, since his teeth are just painted on.
Over all, I like this minifigure and can see using him as an element of chaos for many scenes.
Speedy Gonzales
Speedy comes with many pieces of yellow cheese slopes printed with a Swiss cheese pattern. Who knew Speedy would prefer Swiss cheese?
Speedy’s head is dual molded with brown for his head and ears and orange for his sombrero. He has a long skinny tail as a waist accessory. His head is fully sculpted and looks pretty character accurate from all sides (depending on what you’re referencing since his design has changed over time). His short legs are dual molded brown and white.
In order to turn him into a minifigure, his body proportions have been altered. If he were to retain his two-heads high dimensions his head would need to be much bigger. Personally, I don’t find the altering of the body dimensions for this particular character to be too jarring, since Speedy is an adult character.
I like the Speedy minifig quite a bit. The altering of the body proportion isn’t significant enough to make this character unrecognizable. It may be hard to shoot him as having movement though, since his short legs do not articulate.
Tweety Bird
Um, Tweety seems to have grown up and gotten really burly, or perhaps this is his very buff cousin. He comes with a buildable mallet accessory. Tweety’s face sculpt is somewhat off, with his cheeks a little too wide and puffy.
It’s hard to notice that his face looks slightly wrong with his body being so disproportionate to his original design. Tweety Bird’s cartoon design is 1 ¾ heads high, to give him that baby look, so in order to be character accurate his head would need to be twice as big or his body twice as small as this minifigure.
Tweety’s identity is very closely tied to him being a baby with a tiny little body and very large head and feet. It didn’t even occur to me that turning him into a minifigure would negate his identity.
To illustrate why this character is so off I’ve done an experiment here by sticking his head onto a baby body and using an L shaped lego piece to represent his oversized feet.
The designers really had a tough choice here, to make Tweety into a minifigure or to honor the original character design. I’m not really sure they made the right choice. I think Tweety should have had a custom body, or perhaps been an accessory so that he was more to scale with Sylvester.
Sadly, this Tweety minifigure is pretty disappointing.
Sylvester
The perpetually hungry “puddy-tat”, Sylvester, is another fantastic minifigure that is very character accurate. His head is dual molded and fully sculpted, looking great in all directions.
Sylvester comes with a baseball bat. His legs are dual molded black and white. His tail is a flexible plastic waist accessory that’s painted with a white tip.
Sylvester ranks right up at the top with Daffy as a favorite of mine in this collectible set.
Marvin the Martian
Marvin has travelled through space and back in time from the 24 ½ th century to join the rest of the Looney Tunes minifigures. He comes with a dual molded helmet with painted bristles. His skirt is a fabric waist accessory and he comes with a green disintegration ray gun. Marvin looks character accurate from all directions.
Marvin joins my other favorites in this collectible series.
Box Distribution
I was sent two cases of the Looney Tunes minifigures for review. The distribution of both cases were nearly identical, with only one spot that had a different character. The distribution of the cases will most likely change once they fix the problem with the missing character.
Behind the Scenes
To create this scene, I modified trees from the Winnie the Pooh and the Medieval Blacksmith sets and positioned them on a baseplate. Hills of varying heights were created with LEGO brick on the baseplate, and a grass mat laid over the top.
I cut a sheet of cork into a curving road and used pebbles at the edges to give the road a little texture. Lighting was from a window with a sheet of packing foam as a diffuser, as well as orange cardstock as a reflector to give the minifigures a little color.
Conclusion
This set of Looney Tunes minifigures was a lot of fun to shoot. Many of the characters were spot on to the original and the best ones, in my opinion, were Sylvester, Daffy, and Marvin the Martian. Some of the characters suffered from character inaccuracy, like Porky, Petunia, Road Runner, and Tweety. I hope LEGO manages to fix the problem with the missing character before release, or there will be very many upset collectors.
With my background as an animator, character accuracy is my main criteria of a good licensed toy.
10/10 – Sylvester, Daffy, Marvin
8/10 – Bugs, Lola, Taz, Road Runner, Speedy
6/10 – Porky, Petunia, Tweety
To borrow Four Bricks Tall’s words, on a scale of Oscar to 10, I would give this series a 6. (Oscar the Grouch being the lowest rating, having been released as a face printed on a ball with no body, in case any of you missed that particular news.) The rating would be higher, but I received incomplete sets.