Merrie Melodies is an American animated comedy short film series distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It was part of the Looney Tunes franchise and featured many of the same characters. Originally running from August 2, 1931, to September 20, 1969 (during the golden age of American animation), it was revived in 1979 with new shorts being sporadically released until June 13, 1997. Merrie Melodies originally placed emphasis on one-shot color films in comparison to the black-and-white Looney Tunes films. After Bugs Bunny became the breakout character of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes transitioned to color production in the early 1940s, the two series gradually lost their distinctions and shorts were assigned to each series randomly.

Merrie Melodies was originally produced by Harman–Ising Pictures from 1931 to 1933 and Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944, and the newly renamed Warner Bros. Cartoons continued production until 1963. It was outsourced to DePatie–Freleng Enterprises and Format Productions from 1964 to 1967, and Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Animation resumed production for its final two years of the golden age era. When the series was revived in 1979, DePatie–Freleng produced new shorts briefly, but they were replaced by Chuck Jones Productions the following year. During its final years, the series was produced by Warner Bros. Animation.

The films Tweetie Pie, Speedy Gonzales and Birds Anonymous each won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and another three (Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, and What's Opera, Doc?) have been inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

In 2013, TV Guide ranked the Warner Bros. Cartoons (ranked as Looney Tunes) the third Greatest Cartoon of All Time (out of 60), one of only six film series to make the list (the other five being the Pink Panther series, Popeye the Sailor, Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and Tom and Jerry).

Producer Leon Schlesinger had already produced the music-based Looney Tunes series, and its success prompted him to try to sell a sister series to Warner Bros. His selling point was that the new cartoons would feature music from the soundtracks of Warner Bros. films and would thus serve as advertisements for Warner Bros. recordings and sheet music. The studio agreed, and Schlesinger dubbed the series Merrie Melodies. Walt Disney Productions had already scored with their Silly Symphonies. Since cartoon production usually began with a soundtrack, animating a piece of music made it easier to devise plot elements and even characters.

The origins of the Merrie Melodies series begin with the failure of a live action series of musical shorts called Spooney Melodies, which featured popular songs of the day. These shorts included segments with a popular artist singing along with appropriate background sequences. Warner Bros. wanted to promote this music because they had recently acquired (in 1930) the ownership of Brunswick Records along with four music publishers for US$28 million. Because of the success of their Looney Tunes series, Warner Bros. decided to develop a new series of animated musical shorts called Merrie Melodies. Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising led the development. It was meant to be a series of musical cartoons that featured hit songs of the day, especially those then owned by Warner Bros. and featured in their musical films. In 1931, many of the shorts featured the orchestra of Abe Lyman.

The first cartoon of the new Merrie Melodies series was Lady, Play Your Mandolin!, released in 1931. Ising attempted to introduce several characters in his Merrie Melodies films, such as Piggy, Foxy, and Goopy Geer. Eventually however, the series continued without any recurring characters. The shorts proved to be enormously popular with the public. In 1932, a Merrie Melodies cartoon, entitled It's Got Me Again!, was nominated for the first Academy Award to be given for animation.

When Harman and Ising left Warner Bros., in 1933, they took with them all rights to the characters they had created. Leon Schlesinger had to negotiate with them to keep the rights to the name Merrie Melodies, as well as for the right to use the slogan, "So Long Folks", at the end of the cartoons. In 1934, Schlesinger produced his first color Merrie Melodies shorts, Honeymoon Hotel and Beauty and the Beast, which were produced in two-strip Cinecolor (Disney then had exclusive animation rights to the richer three-strip Technicolor process). Their success convinced Schlesinger to produce all future Merrie Melodies shorts in color, using two-strip Technicolor. Looney Tunes continued in black-and-white until 1943. In 1934, the cartoons began to end with the slogan "That's all Folks!" which had previously only been used on the Looney Tunes series. The old slogan "So Long, Folks!" was completely abandoned at this time. The same year, Merrie Melodies began using the "bulls-eye" opening and closing title sequences; beginning in 1942, Looney Tunes used the same titles, usually with thicker rings. By 1936, Disney's exclusivity on the three-color Technicolor process ended, allowing Merrie Melodies a full color palette for the first time, hence the use of the blue concentric rings (as a technical test) for the rest of the 1935–36 season and the 1936–37 season. The Warner Bros. shield was changed to cyan later that year before definitely changing back to red in 1938.