‘Boomerang’ Launching Standalone Streaming Service
With an ever-increasing television landscape that has no room for the cartoons of our youth, such as the classic MGM and Warner Brothers cartoons, trying to find a network airing these cartoons has been frustrating. The slapstick comedy of yesterday, as highlighted by Tom chasing Jerry or Bugs Bunny putting a hurtin’ on his various foes, is hard to come by these days, with most networks instead airing newer cartoons that lack the same spirit the classic cartoons ever possessed. Combing through YouTube to find the old cartoons ins’t the easiest answer half the time either. Today though, Time Warner has a solution – and that’s by entering the streaming service industry.
Launching sometime in spring 2017, Boomerang will be launching a streaming service, akin to Netflix and Hulu, that will features cartoons from MGM, Hanna Barbera, and Warner Brothers. That’s right – Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and even more (don’t go cross-eyed thinking of all of the titles) – will be available on-demand to watch whenever and wherever you please with absolutely no advertisements to water down your binging experience. For the low cost of $5 a month, the subscription-based service will offer unprecedented access to the Warner Brothers-owned library of 5,000 different titles.
However, don’t expect the traditional cable channel to be phased out. The streaming service will rotate content weekly, since the library is brimmed with content from the last 80 years, while the Turner-owned cable network will air new episodes of the Scooby Doo and Tom & Jerry franchises respectively. Those broadcast-exclusive titles will only be available via its cable outlet only and on-demand. Of course the Boomerang streaming app will have its share of exclusive series, with a reboot of Wacky Races in production (featuring various Hanna Barbera characters involved in slapstick hijinks in races around the world) and Dorothy and The Wizard Of Oz, a new spin on the Frank L. Baum classic.
For those who want to introduce their children to the cartoons of their childhood – and for any adults who just want to be entertained with nostalgia – the Boomerang service is certainly most welcomed, while providing Warner Brothers with a new source of both income and outreach to audiences demanding access to deep content libraries. The service will be available on both Android and Apple devices for $4.99 a month, with a seven-day free trial offer in case you aren’t entertained, and will eventually support Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV. (An app for the Xbox and Sony was unconfirmed in the press release.) You can go to Boomerang’s website now to sign up for updates as to when the service will launch.
Jerrold spent his childhood in southeastern Pennsylvania ingesting far too many TV shows and movies, thus creating a stark-raving mad geek. He’s a movie aficionado, binge-watches Netflix, and is a total TV junkie. His addiction has led to an unhealthy and rabid obsession of various geek pantheons – Star Trek, Star Wars, both DC *AND* Marvel,
cult 80’s and 90’s television, Supernatural, The X-Files, Doctor Who, and, and…holy overload. He’s still waiting to run away in a 1967 Impala or a blue police box.
