Happy 70th Bugs Bunny!!!
Bugs Bunny is among our most favorite characters ever, and Peachy Deegan wishes him a very happy 70th! He looks great for his age, doesn't he? Despite being a gray hare....what's up doc!
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Along with Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny was the most enduring American cartoon character of the 20th century. The acknowledged star of the Warner Brothers cartoon menagerie, Bugs was a cocky, wisecracking, good-hearted hare who battled Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and other slapstick nemeses in dozens of animated short films. Bugs's debut as a star was the 1940 short A Wild Hare, where he first uttered his trademark line, "What's up, Doc?" Credit for the Bugs Bunny character generally goes to Tex Avery, who developed a preliminary character created by fellow animator Ben "Bugs" Hardaway. (Many of the later Bugs Bunny cartoons were directed by Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones; the voice of Bugs was provided by Mel Blanc.) The shorts remain popular in TV reruns.
The 1958 cartoon Knighty Knight, Bugs won the Academy Award for animation... The Warner Brothers cartoons are collectively known as "Looney Tunes"... Bugs co-starred with Michael Jordan in the 1996 feature film Space Jam.
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 best 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.Bugs Bunny Bugs Bunny in "Falling Hare" (1943) First appearance Porky's Hare Hunt (1938) (unofficial)A Wild Hare (1940) (official) Created by Tex Avery (character and early design)Robert McKimson (final design) Voiced by Mel Blanc (original)
See Voice actors
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 directedA 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 and "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque."
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.[1][2] 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.[3]
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".[4] 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".[5]
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.[6] 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 byFriz 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.[1]
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.[7]
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.[8]
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 andCharles 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'sNorthern Territory from 1943 to 1945, flying B-24 Liberator bombers.[9]
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.[10] He also appeared fleetingly in the 1947 Arthur Davis cartoonThe Goofy Gophers.
The post-war era
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.
After the classic cartoon era
When Mel Blanc died in 1989, Jeff Bergman, Joe Alaskey and Billy West became the new voices to Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes, taking turns doing the voices at various times.
Bugs has also made appearances in animated specials for network television, mostly composed of classic cartoons with bridging material added, including How Bugs Bunny Won the West, and The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special. 1980's Bugs Bunny's Busting Out All Over, however, contained no vintage clips and featured the first new Bugs Bunny cartoons in 16 years. It opened with "Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Bunny", which features a flashback of Bugs as a child thwarting a young Elmer Fudd, while its third and closing short was "Spaced Out Bunny", with Bugs being kidnapped by Marvin the Martian to be a playmate for Hugo, an Abominable Snowman-like character (a new Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner short filled out the half hour). Also, there have been various compilation films, including the independently produced Bugs Bunny: Superstar (utilizing the vintage shorts then owned by United Artists), while Warner Bros. assembled The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales and Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. He also made guest appearances in episodes of the 1990s television program Tiny Toon Adventures as the principal of Acme Looniversity and the mentor of Babs and Buster Bunny, and would later make occasional guest cameos on spinoffs Taz-Mania, Animaniacs and Histeria!
He appears in the beginning of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, where he tries to ride the opening Warner Bros logo, but is interrupted by Daffy Duck.
Bugs has had several comic book series over the years. Western Publishing had the license for all the Warner Brothers cartoons, and produced Bugs Bunny comics first for Dell Comics, then later for their own Gold Key Comics. Dell published 58 issues and several specials from 1952 to 1962. Gold Key continued for another 133 issues. DC Comics, the sister/subsidiary company of Warner Bros., has published several comics titles since 1994 that Bugs has appeared in. Notable among these was the 2000 four-issue miniseries Superman & Bugs Bunny, written by Mark Evanier and drawn by Joe Staton. This depicted a crossover between DC's superheroes and the Warner cartoon characters.
In the 1988 animated/live action movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Bugs is shown as one of the inhabitants of Toontown. However, since the film was being produced by Disney, Warner Bros. would only allow the use of their biggest star if he got an equal amount of screen time as Disney's biggest star, Mickey Mouse. Because of this, both characters are always together in frame when onscreen. They appear in a scene where they are skydiving while Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) has no parachute, so Bugs offers him a "spare" which turns out to be a spare tire. They appear in the end as well, along with all the other toons. For the same reasons, Bugs never calls Mickey by his name, only referring to him as "Doc" (while Mickey calls him "Bugs").
Bugs Bunny came back to the silver screen in Box Office Bunny in 1990. This was the first Bugs Bunny cartoon short since 1964 to be released to theaters, and it was created for the Bugs Bunny 50th anniversary celebration. It was followed in 1991 by (Blooper) Bunny, a short that has gained a cult following among some animation fans for its edgy humor.
Bugs made an appearance in the 1990 drug prevention video Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. This special is notable for being the first time that somebody other than Mel Blanc voiced Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (they were voiced by Jeff Bergman.)
In 1997, Bugs appeared on a U.S. postage stamp, the first cartoon to be so honored, beating the iconic Mickey Mouse. The stamp is number seven on the list of the ten most popular U.S. stamps, as calculated by the number of stamps purchased but not used. The introduction of Bugs onto a stamp was controversial at the time, as it was seen as a step toward the 'commercialization' of stamp art. The postal service rejected many designs, and went with a postal-themed drawing. Avery Dennison printed the Bugs Bunny stamp sheet, which featured "a special ten-stamp design and was the first self-adhesive souvenir sheet issued by theU.S. Postal Service."[11]
A younger version of Bugs is the main character of Baby Looney Tunes, which debuted on Cartoon Network in 2002. In the action comedy Loonatics Unleashed, his definite descendant Ace Bunny is the leader of the Loonatics team and seems to have inherited his ancestor's Brooklyn accent and comic wit. Lexi Bunny who is Lola Bunny's confirmed descendant seems to be his second in command and likely love interest. Danger Duck, a descendant of Daffy, has a similar relation with him to that between Bugs and Daffy - envy (jealousy in the extreme case) mixed with a grudging respect.
Bugs has appeared in numerous video games, including the Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle series, Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, Bugs Bunny: Rabbit Rampage and the similar Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble, Looney Tunes B-Ball, Space Jam, Looney Tunes Racing, Looney Tunes: Space Race, Bugs Bunny Lost in Time, and its sequel, Bugs Bunny and Taz Time Busters, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action and the new video game Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal. Bugs and the rest of the Looney Tunes gang will return to Cartoon Network in a brand new show called, The Looney Tunes Show.
Personality and catchphrases
Bugs will usually try to placate the antagonist and avoid conflict, but when an antagonist pushes him too far, Bugs may address the audience and invoke his catchphrase "Of course you realize this means war!" before he retaliates, and the retaliation will be devastating. This line was taken from Groucho Marx and others in the 1933 film Duck Soup and was also used in the 1935 Marx film A Night at the Opera.[12] Bugs would pay homage to Groucho in other ways, such as occasionally adopting his stooped walk or leering eyebrow-raising (in Hair-Raising Hare, for example) or sometimes with a direct impersonation (as in Slick Hare). Sometimes in the beginning of a short, Bugs will pop up in the middle of a random place and say "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque."
Other directors, such as Friz Freleng, characterized Bugs as altruistic. When Bugs meets other successful characters (such as Cecil Turtle in Tortoise Beats Hare, or, in World War II, the Gremlin of Falling Hare), his overconfidence becomes a disadvantage.
During the 1940s, Bugs was immature and wild, but starting in the 1950s his personality matured and his attitude was less frenetic. Though often shown as highly mischievous and violent, Bugs is never actually malicious, and only acts as such in self-defense against his aggressors; the only cartoon where Bugs ever served as a true villain was Buckaroo Bugs.
Bugs Bunny's nonchalant carrot-chewing standing position, as explained by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett, originated in a scene in the film It Happened One Night, in which Clark Gable's character leans against a fence, eating carrots rapidly and talking with his mouth full to Claudette Colbert's character. This scene was well known while the film was popular, and viewers at the time likely recognized Bugs Bunny's behavior as satire.[13]
The carrot-chewing scenes are generally followed by Bugs Bunny's most well-known catchphrase, "What's up, Doc?", which was written by director Tex Avery for his first Bugs Bunny short, 1940's A Wild Hare. Avery explained later that it was a common expression in his native Texas and that he did not think much of the phrase. When the short was first screened in theaters, the "What's up, Doc?" scene generated a tremendously positive audience reaction.[14] As a result, the scene became a recurring element in subsequent films and cartoons. The phrase was sometimes modified for a situation. For example, Bugs says "What's up, dogs?" to the antagonists in A Hare Grows in Manhattan, "What's up, Duke?" to the knight in Knight-mare Hare and "What's up, prune-face?" to the aged Elmer in The Old Grey Hare. He might also greet Daffy with "What's up, Duck?" He used one variation, "What's all the hub-bub, bub?" only once, in Falling Hare. Another variation is used in Looney Tunes: Back In Action when he greets a lightsaber-wielding Marvin the Martian- "What's up, Darth?"
Several Chuck Jones shorts in the late 1940s and 1950s depict Bugs travelling via cross-country (and, in some cases, intercontinental) tunnel-digging, ending up in places as varied as Mexico (Bully For Bugs, 1953), the Himalayas (The Abominable Snow Rabbit, 1960) and Antarctica (Frigid Hare, 1949) all because he "shoulda taken that left toin at Albukoikee." He first utters that phrase in Herr Meets Hare (1945), when he emerges in the Black Forest, a cartoon seldom seen today due to its blatantly topical subject matter. When Hermann Göring says to Bugs, "There is no Las Vegas in 'Chermany'" and takes a potshot at Bugs, Bugs dives into his hole and says, "Joimany! Yipe!", as Bugs realizes he's behind enemy lines. The confused response to his "left toin" comment also followed a pattern. For example, when he tunnels into Scotland in 1948's My Bunny Lies Over The Sea, while thinking he's heading for the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, it provides another chance for an ethnic stereotype: "Therrre's no La Brrrea Tarrr Pits in Scotland!" (to which Bugs responds, "Uh...what's up, Mac-doc?"). A couple of late-1950s shorts of this ilk also featured Daffy Duck travelling with Bugs ("Since when is Pismo Beach inside a cave?!"). He mimmicks Mickey Mouse in 3 ways:1 He wears the same gloves,2 He Is the main character, and 3 Both of their ears are the biggest of all their peers.
Bugs Bunny has some similarities to figures from mythology and folklore, such as Br'er Rabbit, Nanabozho, or Anansi, and might be seen as a modern trickster (for example, he repeatedly uses cross-dressingmischievously). Unlike most cartoon characters, however, Bugs Bunny is rarely defeated in his own games of trickery. One exception to this is the short Hare Brush, in which Elmer Fudd ultimately carries the day at the end; however, critics note that in this short, Elmer and Bugs assume each other's personalities—through mental illness and hypnosis, respectively—and it is only by becoming Bugs that Elmer can win. However, Bugs was beaten at his own game. In the short Duck Amuck he torments Daffy Duck as the unseen animator, ending with his line, "Ain't I a stinker?" Bugs feels the same wrath of an unseen animator in the short Rabbit Rampage where he is in turn tormented by Elmer Fudd. At the end of the clip Elmer gleefully exclaims, 'Well, I finally got even with that scwewy wabbit!"
Although it was usually Porky Pig who brought the WB cartoons to a close with his stuttering, "That's all, folks!", Bugs would occasionally appear, bursting through a drum just as Porky did, but munching a carrot and saying in his Bronx-Brooklyn accent, "And dat's de end!"
The name "Bugs" or "Bugsy" as an old-fashioned nickname means "crazy" (or "loopy"). Several famous people from the first half of the twentieth century had that nickname. It is now out of fashion as a nickname, but survives in 1950s-1960s expressions like "you're bugging me", as in "you're driving me crazy".
