Sorry, but they’re right. I watched the video just now and using a quick double-click on the pause/play button was able to basically get a frame-by-frame sequence where you can clearly see that it is the gap between his legs. It changes shape exactly the way that you would expect given what his legs and body are doing at the time, etc.
What I want to know is: what the heck *is * he covering up with the towel round his waist when he comes out of the shower? Most of the time he wanders around with no clothes and no towel.
It’s just to keep water from dripping on the floor. At least that’s why I put a towel over my shoulders after washing my hair and then wander around the house otherwise naked.
That’s the official reason that other studio gives as to why that incomprehensible duck uses a towel when he doesn’t wear pants: so he doesn’t get the floor wet. No, really.
That doesn’t surprise me since that’s what I would assume. It’s what I do and why I do it. It sure isn’t modesty–I run around naked all the time.
I just tried that and it looks like you might be right. Snopes picked the worst possible screen grab to illustrate their point, though.
I’d like to see other instances of Bugs with an inverted U at the bottom of his belly.
At first I agreed with Cisco, and for the same reasons, but after watching it a few times, frame-by-frame and at normal speed, I think Snopes and Opalcat are right that it is just the space between his legs.
But I think it’s possible that Snopes is wrong when they assert that this is “the product of someone’s imagination” and not a prank by the animators. The animators didn’t have to make the towel slip like that, or make something appear to pop up above it. The inverted U that Cisco pointed out does break the usual style of Bugs’ appearance in that part of his body in a rather suggestive way.
So I think they might have done it as an inside joke that few if any viewers would notice (the “phallus” only appears for three or four frames – 1/8 - 1/6 of a second – at most), but for which they could claim an innocent explanation if anyone did call them on it. “It’s just the space between his legs! What a dirty mind you have!”
Speaking of dirty minds…
Cite?
[D&R]
I was pondering exactly the same thing, which is why I mentioned above that I’d like to see any other instances of the inverted-U. If this is the only one I’d be inclined to think this is plausible. Animators are damn clever by nature and there is plenty of precedent for them creating inside jokes. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if one of them discovered this little optical illusion and put it in for giggles.
1.) See my Teemings essay The Persistence of Bugs Bunny in Teemings:
http://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue12/calmeacham.html
2.) Spoiler:
The creature in the original African tale that “Tortoise Beats Hare” is based on was a Hare, so Bugs’ ancestor was a Hare. Of course, his American ancestor, Br’er Rabbit, was a Rabbit.
All I can say is that I also rarely close my miniblinds.
You can prove it this way: Rabbits are not native to the U.S. - all wild “rabbits” here are hares. And Bugs is definitely All-Amereican.
17 hours? This board is slipping.
Huh? What about cottontails?
[hijack]
In one of the rabbits’ traditional folk-tales in Watership Down, the people of the rabbits’ enemy, King Darzin, are frightened into running way, so that nobody can say, any more, what kind of animals they were or what they looked like. But in another story, one of El-Ahrairah’s lieutenants hides himself among the children in King Darzin’s nursery, and resembles the children enough to pass for one. From which I conclude that King Darzin’s people were hares.
[/hijack]
There was that one Looney Tunes episode, Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow.
Which one lives underground? I think it’s a rabbit.