Today is Bugs Bunny’s 75th birthday!
More to the point, it’s the 75th anniversary of the premiere of the first “real” Bugs Bunny cartoon, “A Wild Hare.” There had been a rabbit in Warner Brothers cartoons before this, in “Porky’s Hare Hunt”, “Presto Change-O”, and (with coloring closer to “our” Bugs) “Hare-Um Scare-Um” and “Elmer’s Candid Camera.” But though this rabbit came to look more like the Bugs we know and love, the personality was quite different–wackier, more flamboyant, more like Daffy Duck in a rabbit suit. (The REALLY daffy Daffy of the early days, not the self-centered guy he became.)
Then “A Wild Hare” premiered, with many of the tropes we came to identify with Bugs… “Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits!” The cool, streetwise self-possession and the Brooklyn accent. “Eh (munch munch), what’s up, Doc?” The use of brains rather than wackiness to put one over on an adversary. The faked death, and Elmer’s remorse at the same. The REAL Bugs Bunny had been born, and there was no stopping him!
(It’s interesting to note that pretty much every one of these tropes was Wagner-ized in Bugs’ magnum opus, “What’s Opera, Doc.” Pretty much the only one of them that DIDN’T show up in AWH was Bugs’ cross-dressing to fool his pursuer!)
I’m rather surprised that WB hasn’t been making more of this. I’ve heard no fanfare at all! (I showed a marathon at my library today, but something was wrong with the DVD another library shipped me, and I couldn’t include “A Wild Hare” in it.)
