Merrie Melodies is an American animated comedy short film series distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

[1] It originally ran from August 2, 1931, to September 20, 1969, during the golden age of American animation, though it was revived in 1979, with new shorts sporadically released until June 13, 1997.

[2] When the series was revived in 1979, DePatie–Freleng produced new shorts briefly, but they were replaced by Chuck Jones Productions the following year.

[3][4][5][6] In 2013, TV Guide ranked the Warner Bros. Cartoons (ranked as Looney Tunes) the third Greatest Cartoon of All Time (out of 60), one of only six film series to make the list (the other five being the Pink Panther series, Popeye the Sailor, Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and Tom and Jerry).

Since cartoon production usually began with a soundtrack, animating a piece of music made it easier to devise plot elements and even characters.

[2] Ising attempted to introduce several characters in his Merrie Melodies films, such as Piggy, Foxy, and Goopy Geer.

[9] Their success convinced Schlesinger to produce all future Merrie Melodies shorts in color, using two-strip Technicolor.

Contractually, Merrie Melodies cartoons were obligated to include at least one full chorus from a Warner Bros.

The policy annoyed the animators of Merrie Melodies, since the songs often interrupted the cartoons' momentum and pacing (the 1938 Merrie Melodie A Feud There Was, for example, sarcastically uses the obligatory musical number as a shift in the action, with the lead characters singing the number into a KFWB microphone and ceding the mike to an announcer who reads a commercial).

By 1940, the animators had been released from this obligation, and the Merrie Melodies shorts came to resemble more closely the black-and-white Looney Tunes series.

In addition, several new characters were created to (initially) appear exclusively in the Merrie Melodies series, such as Egghead, Elmer Fudd, Inki, Sniffles, and even Warner Bros.' most popular cartoon star, Bugs Bunny.

Beginning in late 1943, WB, in a cost-conserving effort, began to reissue its backlog of color cartoons under a new program that they called Merrie Melodies "Blue Ribbon" classics.

Many of these "Blue Ribbon" prints were the versions used for television broadcasts for many years until Warner Bros. began a restoration program in the early 2000s as part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD releases.