Montana Max

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Montana Max
Montana Max

Montana Master Max is a fictional character in the 1990s animated series Tiny Toon Adventures. Monty is voiced by Danny Cooksey.

Montana Max (the Tiny Toons equivalent of Yosemite Sam) is one of the series' major villains, and is also very wealthy. Monty lives in a large mansion on the edge of Acme Acres, the fictional city in which Tiny Toon Adventures takes place. Monty also possesses a nasty disposition and a very short temper, and uses his wealth for his own amusement, often to the discomfort or belittlement of others. He also owns heavily polluting industries that make things like elevator buttons and holes. Some episodes featured Plucky fighting those factories as The Toxic Revenger (pun on The Toxic Avenger).

In the series premiere "The Looney Beginning", it is revealed that Max was the star of a show that had been pitched to Warner Bros. but rejected because of the character's brattiness. Seeking revenge, Max boots Babs and Buster out of the cartoon, steals their scripts, and takes over the show, renaming it The Montana Max Show. Buster and Babs manage to reclaim the show by visiting his mansion disguised as Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd, who Max admits are his personal heroes.

According to the half-hour episode "Citizen Max" (a parody of the movie Citizen Kane), Monty was once impoverished and friends with one of the series' stars, Buster Bunny, until the day his parents won the lottery and became quite wealthy; after this, he abandoned Buster and quickly turned into his familiar, bullying, juvenile delinquent self, thus setting the stage for his long-running feud with the blue rabbit. In the episode "The Acme Acres Zone" (a parody of The Twilight Zone) Max gets an ironic comeuppance from Babs and Buster.

His doorbell at home chimes "Mon-ey!" in place of a bell sound.

Like the other characters in the series, Montana Max attends Acme Looniversity; not surprisingly, his favorite teacher and mentor is Yosemite Sam. Unlike Yosemite, however, Monty is shown to use proper English, instead of using phrases like "ain't" and "ain't none".

Despite Monty's faults, the other major antagonist of Tiny Toon Adventures, Elmyra Duff, seems to harbor manical affection for him. Their relationship to each other is toyed with in the episode "Sepulveda Boulevard", (a parody of Sunset Boulevard) in which Elmyra and Max have characters based on the Norma Desmond and Joe Gilis characters respectively. On occasion, it is implied that he does have romantic feelings for Elmyra (at the end of the short "My Dinner with Elmyra", he admits, "I think I'm in love!"), but would prefer not to show it. In spite of this, Max does not appear in Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain, where Elmyra instead romantically pursued Rudy Mookich.

[edit] Trivia

  • In the manga Hellsing, the primary villain, a Nazi officer, is also named Montana Max. Because he shares many characteristics with his Tiny Toons counterpart, it is to be presumed that Kouta Hirano, author of Hellsing, largely based him on this character.
  • It is speculated that "Montana" could be in reference to Tony Montana from the movie Scarface, though it is possible that it is coincidence. His character may also have been designed as an homage to Montana resident Ted Turner, updating the image of Western nouveau riche from Yosemite Sam, a gold prospector.