Warner Bros. Studio Store
The 90s moment when Looney Tunes was streetwear — Taz on denim jackets, Tweety on tees, Superman holding up the elevator. The Warner Bros. Studio Store was the studio's answer to the Disney Store, and it vanished almost overnight when the corporate weather changed.
Warner Bros. opened its first Studio Store in 1991 at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, four years after the Disney Store had proven a movie studio could run its own mall chain. The shelves carried Looney Tunes and DC Comics merchandise, and the timing was perfect: the 1990s were the decade Taz, Tweety, and Bugs migrated onto jackets, tees, and gold chains, and the Studio Store was the official source.
The chain expanded to 130 locations at its peak, and its flagships were genuine spectacles. The Fifth Avenue store at 57th Street opened in October 1993; in 1997 came the Times Square flagship — three stories and 40,000 square feet, with a glass elevator "carried" by a Superman figure. For a decade a movie studio ran some of the loudest retail theater in America.
Then the corporate weather changed. The AOL Time Warner merger completed in January 2001, and the new company promptly put the chain up for sale with plans to close it if no buyer emerged. None did. By July 2001 only 85 stores remained, and the last of them closed by December 31, 2001 — ten years from flagship to extinction, leaving the merchandise to the collector market and the memory of the Superman elevator to everyone who rode it.
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