Looney Tunes Baseball Card Hold the Mustard

Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930s Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television series, films, comics, music albums, video games and amusement park rides. The series features some of the most well-known and popular cartoon characters in history, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird and Porky Pig. Many of the characters have made cameo appearances in television shows, films and advertisements. The name Looney Tunes is a variation on Silly Symphonies, the name of Walt Disney's concurrent series of music-based cartoon shorts. From 1942 until 1969, Looney Tunes was the most popular short cartoon series in theaters, exceeding Disney and other popular competitors.

Originally produced by Harman-Ising Productions, Looney Tunes were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944, and the newly renamed Warner Bros. Cartoons continued production until 1965. Looney Tunes were outsourced to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises from 1964 to 1967, and WB Cartoons re-assumed production for the series' final two years.
In the early 1950s, WB sold its black-and-white Looney Tunes (plus the first Merrie Melody, Lady, Play Your Mandolin!, and the black-and-white Merrie Melodies made after Harman and Ising left) into television syndication through their subsidiary Sunset Productions. In 1957, Associated Artists Productions (a.a.p.) acquired for television most of Warner Bros' pre-1950 library, including all Merrie Melodies (except for those sold to Sunset) and color Looney Tunes shorts that were released prior to August 1948. Unlike the sale to Sunset Productions, a.a.p. was allowed to keep the Warner titles intact and simply inserted an "Associated Artists Productions presents" title at the head of each reel (as a result, each Merrie Melodie cartoon had the song "Merrily We Roll Along" playing twice). a.a.p. was later sold to United Artists, who merged the company into its television division—United Artists Television. The cartoons were distributed by Guild Films until it went bankrupt and shut down in 1961.
WB then licensed the cartoons to United Artists. In 1981, UA was sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, and five years later, Ted Turner acquired the MGM library—which also included U.S. rights to the RKO Pictures library, in addition to its own pre-1986 material, the classic MGM library, and some of UA's own product. In 1996, Warner Bros bought Turner Enterprises, which owned the MGM's pre-1986 library and the Looney Tunes shorts, thus gaining syndication rights back. Turner's company, Turner Broadcasting System (whose Turner Entertainment division oversaw the film library), merged with Time Warner in 1996. Today, Warner Home Video holds the video rights to the entire Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies animated output by virtue of WB's ownership of Turner Entertainment—this is why their Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD box sets include cartoons from both the pre-8/48 Turner-owned and post-7/48 WB owned periods. As of 2006, all Warner Bros' animated output are under the same Time Warner umbrella of ownership.