takes its goods to market on publicly maintained roads, sells its sitcoms and movies to networks that broadcast on public airwaves, and distributes its movies to theaters and homes through fiber-optic cables that run over and under public land. (Bugs didn’t enter the armed services until 1953.) Taxpayers are responsible for the success of the entertainment industry, directly in several cases, but also indirectly. to have these cartoons made, and to sell war bonds with Bugs Bunny as pitchman and draft Daffy Duck.

(That captain’s name, incidentally, was Theodor Geisel.) The American taxpayers paid Warner Bros. The unit was commanded by an Air Force captain and produced cartoons at an incredible pace, one every six weeks. The Private Snafu cartoons-and many others-were made at the classic Looney Tunes studio, nicknamed Termite Terrace, as part of a contract with the Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit. The other reason to zealously preserve and distribute Looney Tunes to the American public is that they are, at least in part, ours. Discovery subsidiary Turner Classic Movies.

The original page no longer exists on the website of Warner Bros. You can look up a handy list of the vault fires that destroyed so much of Hollywood’s history, but you’ll have to do it through the Internet Archive. The decentralization of the internet does not protect it from this kind of disaster. To the extent that the work held in these vaults still survives, it is because individual movie lovers held on to the prints. Another fire, at the National Archives, destroyed all the newsreels from 1940 to 1945. A vault fire in 1965 destroyed nearly one-third of the MGM library a fire in the RKO vault destroyed the negatives for Citizen Kane. That warehouse burned to the ground in 1937, destroying 75 percent of the features the studio released before 1930.

When Fox Film and Twentieth Century Pictures merged in 1935, they rented a warehouse in New Jersey to store old reels of film. Much of the history of American film has been lost to the kinds of accidents Discovery is now courting.

World war 11 looney toons