I was going to suggest just that.
depending on the weapon of course. If it’s just a mallet and has no player controls a one shot animation works best.
if you need to pull out a gun and need to trigger it things get more complicated.
if you want the mallet to “find” the enemy things get more complicated too…
If you wanted to go the crazy way about it you could create a morph target weapon, flatten out its geometry so it’s essentially invisible and inflate it during animation time with a morph target…
You did say LOONEY Toons…