‘Tiny Toon Adventures’ Proved Representation Matters, Decades Ago

Representation matters. That’s become abundantly clear as the rise of social media has given marginalized groups a megaphone to call out exclusion and shout out inclusion. The last few years have seen hits both critical (Best Picture winners Moonlight and The Shape of Water) and commercial (the unstoppable Wonder Woman and Black Panther) put representation front-and-center. But as people in front of and behind the camera that don’t fit into the straight-while-male mold gain attention and success, there are plenty of detractors trying to wave all this away as a passing fad. It’s not. Representation has always mattered–and that’s why I wanna talk about an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures from 1990.

You heard me right: Tiny Toon Adventures, Warner Bros.’ response to The Flintstone Kids (JK, I know it was really the response to Muppet Babies–just kidding!).

The episode is “Fields of Honey,” which comes halfway through Tiny Toon’s initial 65-episode run. The average Tiny Toons episode usually consisted of a handful of shorts, but “Fields of Honey” is an episode-length ode to the 1989 film Field of Dreams and the notion that it’s important for viewers (specifically kids) to have role models they can relate to.

In the episode, series co-lead Babs Bunny finds herself mentorless at Acme Looniversity because all the classic Warner Bros. cartoon heroes are dudes. Buster Bunny has Bugs, Hampton Pig has Porky, Plucky Duck has Daffy, and Babs is, as she puts it, a “girl without a guru.”

“How come all the old Warner Bros. stars were guys?” asks Babs in a weekday afternoon cartoon episode from 1990, and not in a Tumblr post in 2018. “Not one girl! It isn’t fair! It’s left me with no one to look up to and it’s put me in a really bad mood this whole episode!” Making matters worse: all her guy friends are too busy arguing about which one of their male heroes is the best to even notice that Babs is down in the dumps.

Sidenote: It’s worth pointing out that the Tiny Toons creators knew that rep was important 30 years ago, as they actually gender-flipped a number of characters when rounding out the new show’s cast. Elmer Fudd inspired Elmyra, Pepe Le Pew inspired Fifi La Fume, and Tweety Bird inspired Sweetie Pie.

Babs finds a hero, however, when a mystery voice (remember, this is a Field of Dreams riff) whispers “if you watch them, you will find her.” Babs sits down and watches every Looney Tune in the cartoon vault, eventually coming across one titled “Bosko in Person” from 1933. She puts it on and there she is: Honey, a wacky female character that loves to do impersonations just like Babs. Babs responds in a cartoony way that feels super real:

That image is exactly what it feels like to finally see an oft-overlooked part of yourself reflected back at you on screen. Being gay, it’s how I felt watching Richard Jenkins’ gay hero in The Shape of Water. In fact, writing that article knocked loose this vague memory I had of an early ’90s cartoon that dealt specifically with onscreen representation. That episode was this one. Babs’ starry-eyed reaction to Honey had obviously made an impression on me 27 years earlier, and with good reason. How Babs feels about Honey is how a generation of women felt about Princess Leia as kids, and how kids today feel about Rey in The Force Awakens or Wonder Woman or the cast of Black Panther. It’s exactly how I felt back in middle school when I first saw Tony Slattery–an irrepressible and scampish gay–on Whose Line is it Anyway? Tiny Toons took that feeling of needing and finding a hero and put it into an episode.

Another sidenote: Bosko and Honey are real characters, which I did not know before I started researching this piece. They starred in dozens of Looney Tunes shorts between 1929 and 1938–and they were crazy racist. Some people say that the characters were meant to be sentient ink spots, but most agree they’re racist caricatures. Tiny Toons’ updated portrayal of Bosko and Honey thankfully presents them as unidentifiably generic cartoons, and possible predecessors to the cartoon sibling stars of Animaniacs. Knowing Honey’s real history adds a complicated wrinkle to this episode, but it is one that also rings true even if this kids’ show doesn’t get into it: sometimes those inspirational groundbreakers were also really, really gross or did gross things in addition to smashing glass ceilings. I could honestly go on for a thousand words about this, but this is a sidenote! 

After discovering Honey, Babs gets to work celebrating her legacy. The whisper urges her to build a theater to show Honey’s cartoons, and then helps her come up with a marketing plan. Babs’ keen impersonations (the very thing she admires in Honey) help her throughout the episode, which culminates in the elderly Honey being rejuvenated by the sound of a full audience’s nonstop laughter.

Not only does this episode prove that representation has always mattered, it points out that a history written by gatekeepers often forgets trailblazers that don’t match a specific type. It’s up to those outside the mainstream to champion those that came before, those that history books ignore. And that’s a lesson that Tiny Toons taught kids almost 30 years ago.

Watch Tiny Toon Adventures' "Fields of Honey" on Hulu