Toon



In the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a "Toon" (abbreviation of "cartoon") is an animated or cartoon creature or character who can interact with the real world. All Toons come from another dimension known as the “Tooniverse,” and the only way into it from the real world is Toontown, an animated metropolis adjacent to Los Angeles where most Toons live.

All Toons were once put in danger when Judge Doom (a crazy Toon disguised as a real human) planned on destroying Toontown (by using Dip) for commercial trade and a proposed freeway. All Toons were almost completely wiped out until Doom’s plans were stopped by Eddie Valiant, along with Jessica and Roger Rabbit.

Toon Biology and Features
Most Toons tend to have exaggerated, usually anthropomorphic, appearances based on some real animal or object. Toons could be humans, realistic humans, anthropomorphic animals, realistic animals, robots, objects, anthropomorphic objects, extraterrestrial creatures, mythical beings, and other unidentified, newly imagined creatures, monsters, or abstract, surreal characters, often having grossly caricatured appearances, odd physical features (e.g., four fingered hands, floating eyes and eyebrows, etc.) or extreamly realistic appearances.

Almost all Toons (depending on their personality) have an innate sense of comedic or dramatic timing. Most Toons also have (also depending on their personality) an intense focus on a single-minded goal, such as hunting, catching prey, having selfish needs, being hungry, or capturing the object of one's romantic feelings; generally with comedic or dramatic results.

Because of their interdimensional origins, most Toons possessed amusing abilities that contradict laws of physics in the real world, usually disregarding the physical laws that govern the real universe when traveling inside the real world (and a reciprocal disregard of those laws for them). Toons could also accomplish feats and possessed powers which were impossible for anything or anyone in the real world to imitate. All Toons are also almost completely immune and nearly indestructible to any serious injury (e.g., being crushed, shot, decapitated, frozen or burned, stretched, etc.). This is especially seen in Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Toons, however, used these unique abilities to entertain Humans in the real world. The only way to actually permanently kill a Toon is to dip it in “Dip”, because the chemicals that make up Dip are paint thinners (though Eddie Valiant defeated Doom’s weasels by making them laugh to death).

Toons also never aged. Many theatrical shorts and comic strips often feature characters in both present day and moments of history, and in both examples they don't appear to have ages. In comics or movies, whenever certain animated characters appear to age according to time, are actually different versions of the same character playing the part of that character.

Some Toons also had the ability to produce certain things to show feelings and emotions (e.g., hearts floating over heads when in love, explosions in eye pupils and/or steam shooting out of ears when angry, stars or birds orbiting heads after spinning around and/or getting smashed, etc.). Comic strips are produced by photographing Toon characters that spoke in word balloons which appeared above their heads whenever they talked.

Notable Toons
With the exception of the characters appearing in or created specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, all animated/cartoon characters ever created (ranging from the early 1900s to the 2000s) are Toons.

Origins
The origin of the word probably was started by the name of the Looney Tunes series of animated shorts by Warner Brothers (though the spelling is different). It was first used in the 1981 Gary K. Wolf novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and its film adaptation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These two works created and established the Toon Noir sub-genre, which features toons and non-toon humans living together, each playing by their own set of physics. The small sub-genre also includes Disney's Raw Toonage, Bonkers, and House of Mouse and Warner Brothers' Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid cartoon series and the films Space Jam (1996), The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), and also the video games Go! Go! Hypergrind, Toonstruck, and the MMORPG Toontown Online.

Other Uses
"Toon" is also a terminology used by players of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) to describe ones character or avatar within the game. The term is believed to be used again as a shortened form of cartoon, used as the character in the game is often an animated representation of themselves, or a 'cartoon' version. This is despite the fact that the term 'avatar,' a more literally accurate term, had already been in widespread use before 'toon' rose to prevalence.