by Gerald Boerner
When cartoon animation is discussed, attention is generally directed towards Walt Disney’s stable of characters. The first animated cartoon character was created by Disney in 1928 and dominated the genre for years. But there were other sets of characters that eventually appeared and brightened our Saturday afternoon movie session at the local cinema.
In 1938, Bugs Bunny appeared on the scene and was eventually accompanied by some of our other favorites like Woody Woodpecker, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd. The adventures of these characters tried to keep the spirits of those kids living during the war years (World War II and Korea).
As television matured, Bugs Bunny took his rightful place on the Saturday morning children’s hours along with some of our other favorites. Eventually they became “so-so” and were replaced by more hip and thematic programs, but we shall ever remember those wonderful afternoons in the movie theater waiting for the main feature while watching a cartoon and serial from the past. GLB
[ 2750 Words ]
“98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first – and the other 2% are lying.”
— David Remnick
“After I had done a handful of cartoons I was satisfied with, I started submitting them to the magazines.”
— Joseph Barbera
“And, uh, I’ve got about six thousand cartoons up there, also books and papers.”
— Rube Goldberg
“As soon as I found out how compartmentalized the industry was, I realized, Well, no wonder the cartoons are so bad.”
— John Kricfalusi
“At one time Tribune Syndicate emptied out their storeroom. They put tables full of original cartoons down in the lobby and said take one if you want one. The comics were simply a burden to them.”
— Mort Walker
“Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I’m a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.”
— Ralph Bakshi
“He always describes his characters’ voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They’re grotesques really.”
— Simon Callow
“But by us doing a lot on the road, we were able to afford things like videos on the tours, cartoons that we’d open up the shows with. We were doing that way back when and now it’s the hippest thing to do. We’re just coming back around, I guess trying to play catch-up.”
— Bootsy Collins
Bugs Bunny Makes his Debut
Bugs Bunny is an American fictional character who in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated films produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions, which became Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1944. In 2002, he was named by TV Guide as the greatest cartoon character of all time. Currentlycorporate [[Warner Brothers, especially its animated productions. Bugs starred in 163 shorts in the Golden Age of American animation, and made cameos in three others along with a few appearances in non-animated films.
According to Bugs Bunny: 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare, he was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York (in a warren under Ebbets Field, famed home of the Brooklyn Dodgers), created by Tex Avery (who directed A Wild Hare, Bugs Bunny’s debut) and Robert McKimson (who created the definitive Bugs Bunny character design), among many others. According to Mel Blanc, the character’s original voice actor, Bugs Bunny has a Flatbush accent, an equal blend of the Bronx and Brooklyn dialects (of the New York Accent). His catchphrase is a casual "Eh…what’s up, doc?", usually said while chewing a carrot. His other popular phrases include "Of course you realize, this means war", "Ain’t I a stinker?" and "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque."
Bugs Bunny is the main character of the Looney Tunes series.
The Unnamed, Prototype Warner Bros. Rabbit
An unnamed rabbit bearing some of the personality, if not physical characteristics of Bugs, first appeared in the cartoon short Porky’s Hare Hunt, released on April 30, 1938. Co-directed by Ben Hardaway and an uncredited Cal Dalton (who was responsible for the initial design of the rabbit), this short had a theme almost identical to that of the 1937 cartoon, Porky’s Duck Hunt (directed by Tex Avery), which had introduced Daffy Duck. Porky Pig was again cast as a hunter tracking another silly prey who seemed less interested in escape than in driving his pursuer insane; this short replaced the black duck with a small white rabbit. The rabbit introduces himself with the odd expression "Jiggers, fellers", and Mel Blanc gave the rabbit nearly the voice and laugh that he would later use for Woody Woodpecker. This cartoon also features the famous Groucho Marx line that Bugs would use many times: "Of course you know, this means war!" The rabbit developed a following from the audience viewing this cartoon which inspired the Schlesinger staff to further develop the character.
First incarnation of the rabbit
debuts in Porky’s Hare Hunt
(1938)
The rabbit’s second appearance came in 1939′s Prest-O Change-O, directed by Chuck Jones, where he is the pet rabbit of unseen character Sham-Fu the Magician. Two dogs, fleeing the local dogcatcher, enter his absent master’s house. The rabbit harasses them, but is ultimately bested by the bigger of the two dogs.
His third appearance was in another 1939 cartoon, Hare-um Scare-um, directed by Dalton and Hardaway. This short, the first where he was depicted as a gray bunny instead of a white one, is also notable both for the rabbit’s first singing role. Charlie Thorson, lead animator on the short, was the first to give the character a name. He had written "Bugs’ Bunny" on the model sheet that he drew for Hardaway, implying that he considered the rabbit model sheet to be Hardaway’s property. In promotional material for the short (such as a surviving 1939 presskit), the name on the model sheet was altered to become the rabbit’s own name: "Bugs" Bunny (quotation marks only used at the very beginning), evidently named in honor of "Bugs" Hardaway.
In Chuck Jones’ Elmer’s Candid Camera the rabbit first encounters Elmer Fudd. This rabbit has more of a physical resemblance to the present-day Bugs, being taller and having a more similar face. The voice for this rabbit, however, was not similar to the well-known Brooklyn-Bronx accent, but spoke in a rural drawl. This early version of Elmer is also quite different from the present-day one, being much fatter and taller, although the voice, done by Arthur Q. Bryan, is the same. In Robert Clampett’s 1940 Patient Porky, a similar rabbit appears to trick the audience into thinking that 750 rabbits have been born.
In his later years, Mel Blanc stated that a proposed name was "Happy Rabbit". Ironically, the only time the name "Happy" was used was in reference to Bugs Hardaway. In the cartoon Hare-um Scare-um, the newspaper headline reads, "Happy Hardaway".
Bugs Bunny Emerges
Bugs’ appearance in A Wild Hare, directed by Tex Avery and released on July 27, 1940, is considered the first appearance of both Elmer and Bugs in their fully developed forms. It was in this cartoon that he first emerged from his rabbit hole to ask Elmer Fudd, now a hunter rather than a photographer, "What’s up, Doc?" Animation historian Joe Adamson counts A Wild Hare as the first "official" Bugs Bunny short. It is also the first cartoon where Mel Blanc uses a recognizable version of the voice of Bugs that would eventually become the standard.
Bugs’ second appearance in Jones’ Elmer’s Pet Rabbit finally introduced the audience to the name Bugs Bunny, which up until then had only been used among the Termite Terrace employees. However, the rabbit here is absolutely identical to the one in Jones’ earlier Elmer’s Candid Camera, both visually and vocally. It was also the first short where he received billing under his now-famous name, but the card, "featuring Bugs Bunny", was just slapped on the end of the completed short’s opening titles when A Wild Hare proved an unexpected success. He would soon become the most prominent of the Looney Tunes characters as his calm, flippant insouciance endeared him to American audiences during and after World War II.
Bugs would appear in five more shorts during 1941: Tortoise Beats Hare, directed by Tex Avery and featuring the first appearance of Cecil Turtle; Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt, the first Bugs Bunny short to be directed by Friz Freleng; All This and Rabbit Stew, directed by Avery and featuring a young African-American hunter (based heavily on racial stereotypes) as Bugs’ antagonist; The Heckling Hare, the final Bugs short Avery worked on before being fired and leaving for MGM; and Wabbit Twouble, the first Bugs short directed by Robert Clampett. Wabbit Twouble was also the first of five Bugs shorts to feature a chubbier remodel of Elmer Fudd, a short-lived attempt to have Fudd more closely resemble his voice actor, comedian Arthur Q. Bryan.
World War II
By 1942, Bugs had become the number one star of the Merrie Melodies series, which had originally been intended only for one-shot characters in shorts after several early attempts to introduce characters failed under Harman-Ising, but had started introducing newer characters in 1937 under Schlesinger. Bugs’ 1942 shorts included Friz Freleng’s The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, and the Robert Clampett shorts The Wacky Wabbit and Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (which introduced Beaky Buzzard). Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid also marks a slight redesign of Bugs, making his front teeth less prominent and his head rounder. The man responsible for this redesign was Robert McKimson, at the time working as an animator under Robert Clampett. The redesign at first was only used in the shorts created by Clampett’s production team but in time, it would be adopted by the other directors, with Freleng and Frank Tashlin the first to adopt this design. Upon his own promotion to director, McKimson created yet another version with more slanted eyes, longer teeth and a much larger mouth, which he (and, for the one Bugs Bunny cartoon he directed, Art Davis) used until 1949, when he started using the version he had designed for Clampett. Jones would come up with his own slight modification, and the voice as well would vary mildly between the units.
Other 1942 Bugs shorts included Chuck Jones’ Hold the Lion, Please, Freleng’s Fresh Hare and The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (which restored Elmer Fudd to his previous size), and Jones’ Case of the Missing Hare. He also made cameo appearances in Tex Avery’s final Warner Bros. short, Crazy Cruise, and starred in the two-minute United States war bonds commercial film Any Bonds Today.
Bugs was popular during World War II because of his free and easy attitude, and began receiving special star billing in his cartoons by 1943. By that time, Warner Bros. was the most profitable cartoon studio in the United States. Like other cartoon studios, such as Disney and Famous Studios had been doing, Warners put Bugs in opposition to the period’s biggest enemies: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and the Japanese. The 1944 short Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips features Bugs at odds with a group of Japanese soldiers. This cartoon has since been pulled from distribution due to its racial stereotypes.
Since Bugs’ debut in A Wild Hare, he had appeared only in color Merrie Melodie cartoons (making him one of the few recurring characters created for that series in the Leon Schlesinger era prior to the full conversion to color, alongside Elmer’s prototype Egghead, Inki, Sniffles, and Elmer himself – who was heard but not seen in the 1942 Looney Tunes cartoon Nutty News, and made his first formal appearance in that series in 1943′s To Duck or Not To Duck). While he did make a cameo appearance in the 1943 Porky and Daffy cartoon Porky Pig’s Feat marking his only appearance in a black-and-white Looney Tune cartoon, he did not star in a cartoon in the Looney Tunes series until that series made its complete conversion to only color cartoons beginning with 1944 releases. Buckaroo Bugs was Bugs’ first cartoon in the Looney Tunes series, and was also the last WB cartoon to credit Leon Schlesinger.
Among his most notable civilian shorts during this period are Bob Clampett’s Tortoise Wins by a Hare (the sequel to Tortoise Beats Hare from 1941), A Corny Concerto (a spoof of Disney’s Fantasia), Falling Hare, and What’s Cookin’ Doc?; and Chuck Jones’ Superman parody Super-Rabbit, and Freleng’s Little Red Riding Rabbit. The 1944 short Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears introduced Jones’ The Three Bears characters.
In the cartoon Super-Rabbit, Bugs was seen in the end wearing a USMC dress uniform. As a result, the United States Marine Corps made Bugs an honorary Marine Master Sergeant.
From 1943-1946, Bugs was the official "mascot" of Kingman Army Air Field, Kingman, Arizona, where thousands of aerial gunners were trained during World War II. Some notable trainees included Clark Gable and Charles Bronson. Bugs also served as the mascot for 530 Squadron of the 380th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force, USAF, which was attached to the Royal Australian Air Force and operated out of Australia’s Northern Territory from 1943 to 1945, flying B-24 Liberator bombers.
In 1944, Bugs Bunny actually made a cameo appearance in Jasper Goes Hunting, a short produced by rival studio Paramount Pictures. In this cameo (animated by Robert McKimson, with Mel Blanc providing the voice), Bugs pops out of a rabbit hole, saying his usual catchphrase; Bugs then says, "I must be in the wrong picture" and then goes back in the hole. He also appeared fleetingly in the 1947 Arthur Davis cartoon The Goofy Gophers.
The Post-War Era
A scene from Bewitched
Bunny (1954)
A slight variation of how the character was drawn in the 1950s can be seen in the frame from Bewitched Bunny (1954). The inner pinkish parts of the ears have been reduced becoming more v-shaped at the top end and the ovalness of the eyes also replaced with a more top v shaped look. His cheeks protrude out more, and body is more compacted, when compared how he was drawn in the 1940s, arising to the distinct look of how he is drawn today.
Since then, Bugs has appeared in numerous cartoon shorts in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series, making his last appearance in the theatrical cartoons in 1964 with False Hare. He was directed by Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, Arthur Davis and Chuck Jones and appeared in feature films, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (which featured the first-ever meeting between Bugs and his box-office rival Mickey Mouse), Space Jam (which co-starred Michael Jordan), and the 2003 movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
The Bugs Bunny short Knighty Knight Bugs (1958), in which a medieval Bugs Bunny traded blows with Yosemite Sam and his fire-breathing dragon (which has a cold), won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1958. Three of Chuck Jones’ Bugs Bunny shorts–Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!— comprise what is often referred to as the "Duck Season/Rabbit Season" trilogy, and are considered among the director’s best works. Jones’ 1957 classic, What’s Opera, Doc?, features Bugs and Elmer parodying Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was the first cartoon short to receive this honor.
Bugs appeared in the 1957 short Show Biz Bugs with Daffy Duck, which features a controversial finish in which Daffy Duck, in an attempt to wow the (partisan) audience, did a dangerous magical act in which he (in sequence) drank gasoline, swallowed nitroglycerine, gunpowder, and uranium-238 (in a greenish solution), jumped up and down to "shake well", and finally swallowed a match that detonated the whole improbable mixture. That incident caused some TV stations, and in the 1990s the cable network TNT, to edit out the dangerous act, fearing that young kids might try to imitate it.
In the fall of 1960, The Bugs Bunny Show, a television program which packaged many of the post-1948 Warners shorts with newly animated wraparounds, debuted on ABC. The show was originally aired in prime-time. After two seasons, it was moved to reruns on Saturday mornings. The Bugs Bunny Show changed format and exact title frequently (the packaging was completely different, with each short simply presented on its own, title and all, though some clips from the new bridging material was used as filler), but it remained on network television for 40 years.
References
Other Events on this Day:
In 1866…
Cyrus W. Field succeeds in laying the first successful transatlantic cable.In 1909…
Orville Wright makes a record flight of 1 hour, 12 minutes, and 40 seconds while demonstrating the Military Flyer, the first military plane, at Fort Myer, Virginia.In 1940…
Bugs Bunny makes his debut in the cartoon A Wild Hare.In 1953…
The Korean War armistice is signed at Panmunjom, a village on the border between North and South Korea.In 1955…
The Korean War Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
Dates and events based on:
William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)
Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: Bugs Bunny…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_Bunny
Brainy Quote: Cartoon Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/cartoons.html
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