| Name | Bugs Bunny |
|---|---|
| Caption | Bugs Bunny as seen today |
| First | Prototype: Porky's Hare Hunt Official: A Wild Hare |
| Creator | Ben Hardaway (prototype),Tex Avery (official character and early visual design),Bob Clampett (final visual design) |
| Voice | Mel Blanc (1940–1989),others (see below) |
Bugs Bunny is an American fictional character who starred in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated films produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions, which became Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1944. 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, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was actually created by many animators and staff, including Tex Avery, who directed A Wild Hare, Bugs Bunny's debut, and Robert McKimson, who created the definitive Bugs Bunny character design. According to Mel Blanc, the character's original voice actor, Bugs Bunny has a Flatbush accent. His catchphrase is a casual "Eh...what's up, doc?", usually said while chewing a carrot. Other popular phrases include "Of course you realize, this means war", "Ain't I a stinker?", "What a maroon!" (a twist on "moron"), "What a !", and "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque." He is the most prominent of the Looney Tunes characters as his calm, flippant endeared him to American audiences during and after World War II. He is a mascot of the Looney Tunes series, and Warner Brothers in general.
An unnamed rabbit with some of the personality of Bugs, though looking very different, first appears 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 has an almost identical plot to Tex Avery's 1937 cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt, which had introduced Daffy Duck. Porky Pig is again cast as a hunter tracking a silly prey less interested in escape than in driving his pursuer insane. The latter short replaces the little black duck with a small white rabbit. The rabbit introduces himself with the odd expression "Jiggers, fellers", and Mel Blanc gave the rabbit a voice and laugh almost like that he would later use for Woody Woodpecker. This cartoon also first uses the famous Groucho Marx line, "Of course you realize, this means war!" This rabbit was so popular with its audience that the Schlesinger staff decided to use it again.
The rabbit appears again 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 is in another 1939 cartoon, Hare-um Scare-um, directed by Dalton and Hardaway. This short, the first where he is depicted as a gray bunny instead of a white one, is also notable for the rabbit's first singing role. Charlie Thorson, lead animator on the short, gave 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, including 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). In his later years, Mel Blanc stated that a proposed name was "Happy Rabbit".
In Chuck Jones' Elmer's Candid Camera the rabbit first meets Elmer Fudd. This rabbit looks more like the present-day Bugs, taller and with a similar face. This rabbit, however, speaks with a rural drawl. The early version of Elmer is also different from the present-day one, much fatter and taller, although Arthur Q. Bryan's voice is the same as it would be later. In Robert Clampett's 1940 Patient Porky, a similar rabbit appears to trick the audience into thinking that 750 rabbits have been born.
Bugs's second appearance in Jones's Elmer's Pet Rabbit introduces the audience to the name Bugs Bunny, which until then had only been used among the Termite Terrace employees. 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. The rabbit here is in look and voice identical to the one in Jones' earlier Elmer's Candid Camera.
Bugs in his Wild Hare likeness appeared in five more shorts during 1941. Tortoise Beats Hare, directed by Tex Avery, features the first appearance of Cecil Turtle; Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt, is the first Bugs Bunny short directed by Friz Freleng; All This and Rabbit Stew, directed by Avery, has Bugs tracked by a little African-American hunter (based heavily on racial stereotypes); The Heckling Hare was the final Bugs short Avery worked on before being fired (Avery and producer Schlesinger vehemently disagreed over the ending gag of The Heckling Hare, and Avery refused to compromise his creative principles) 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.
Bugs became more 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. had become the most profitable cartoon studio in the United States. In company with cartoon studios such as Disney and Famous Studios, Warners put its characters against 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. He also faces off against Herman Goering and Hitler in Herr Meets Hare, which introduced his well-known reference to Albuquerque as he mistakenly winds up in the Black Forest of 'Joimany' instead of Las Vegas, Nevada.
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 made a cameo appearance in the 1943 Porky and Daffy cartoon Porky Pig's Feat this was 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 (a sequel to 1941's Tortoise Beats Hare); A Corny Concerto, a spoof of Disney's Fantasia'); Falling Hare; What's Cookin' Doc?; Chuck Jones's Superman parody Super-Rabbit'; and Freleng's Little Red Riding Rabbit. The 1944 short Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears introduces Jones' The Three Bears characters.
At the end of the cartoon Super-Rabbit, Bugs appears wearing a United States Marine Corps dress blue uniform. As a result, the Marine Corps made Bugs an honorary Marine Master Sergeant. From 1943 to 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, U.S. Air Force, 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 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.
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.
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, , 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 . Bugs and the rest of the Looney Tunes gang will return to Cartoon Network in 2011 in a brand new show called The Looney Tunes Show, with Jeff Bergman returning to voice both Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
On August 13, 2010, Warner Bros. Pictures announced that they are planning a live-action/CG-animated combo feature film based on the Looney Tunes character.
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. 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).
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.
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. 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 when he greets a lightsaber-wielding Marvin the Martian saying "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?!").
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-dressing mischievously). 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".
Bugs wears white gloves, which he is rarely seen without. One example is the episode Long-Haired Hare, where Bugs pretends to be the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski and instructs opera star "Giovanni Jones" to sing and to hold a high note. As Giovanni Jones is turning red with the strain, Bugs slips his left hand out of its glove, leaving the glove hovering in the air in order to command Jones to continue to hold the high note. Bugs then nips down to the mail drop to order, and then to receive, a pair of ear muffs. Bugs puts on the ear defenders and then zips back into the amphitheater and reinserts his hand into his glove as singer Jones is writhing on the stage, still holding that same high note.
Bugs Bunny is also a master of disguise: he can wear any disguise that he wants to confuse his enemies: in Bowery Bugs he uses diver disguises: fakir, gentleman, woman, baker and finally policeman. This ability of disguise makes Bugs famous because we can recognize him while at the same time realizing that his enemies are trapped. Bugs has a certain preference for the female disguise: Taz, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam were fooled by this sexy bunny (woman) and in Hare Trimmed, Sam discovers the real face of "Granny" (Bugs's disguise) in the church where they attempt to get married. for some reason, Daffy Duck and Cecil turtle aren't fooled by the disguises.
Bugs Bunny may also have some mystical potential. In Knight-mare Hare he was able to return to his bunny form (after being transformed into a donkey) by removing his donkey form as if it were a suit. Merlin of Monroe (the wizard) was unable to do the same thing. Later Bugs Bunny defeated the Count Blood Count in a magical spell duel. However, the story was a dream and Bugs Bunny's victory over Count Blood Count was a result of his intellect, not innate magical power.
Within the cartoons, although the term "hare" comes up sometimes, again typically as a pun (for example, Bugs drinking "hare tonic" to "stop falling hare" or being doused with "hare restorer" to bring him back from invisibility), Bugs as well as his antagonists most often refer to the character as a "rabbit". The word "bunny" is of no help in answering this question, as it is a synonym for both young hares and young rabbits.
In Nike commercials with Michael Jordan, Bugs had been referred to as "Hare Jordan."
;Mel Blanc :Mel Blanc voiced the character for 49 years, from Bugs' debut in A Wild Hare (1940) until Blanc's death in 1989. Blanc described the voice as a combination of Bronx and Brooklyn accents; however, Tex Avery claimed that he asked Blanc to give the character not a New York accent per se, but a voice like that of actor Frank McHugh, who frequently appeared in supporting roles in the 1930s and whose voice might be described as New York Irish. In Bugs' second cartoon Elmer's Pet Rabbit, Blanc created a completely new voice for Bugs, which sounded like a Jimmy Stewart impression, but the directors decided the previous voice was better. Though his best-known character was the carrot-chomping rabbit, munching on the carrots interrupted the dialogue. Various substitutes, such as celery, were tried, but none of them sounded like a carrot. So for the sake of expedience, he would munch and then spit the carrot bits into a spittoon rather than swallowing them, and continue with the dialogue. One oft-repeated story, possibly originating from , is that he was allergic to carrots and had to spit them out to minimize any allergic reaction — but his autobiography makes no such claim; in fact, in a 1984 interview with Tim Lawson, co-author of The Magic Behind The Voices: A Who's Who of Cartoon Voice Actors (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), Blanc emphatically denied being allergic to carrots.
;Jeff Bergman :Jeff Bergman was the first to voice Bugs (and several other Looney Tunes characters) after Mel Blanc died in 1989. He got the job by impressing Warner Bros. higher-ups with a tape of himself re-creating the voices of several of Blanc's characters, including Bugs Bunny. He had rigged the tape player so that he could use a switch to instantly toggle back and forth between the original recording of Blanc and Bergman's recording of the same lines. Upon doing this, it was almost impossible for the producers to tell which voice was Blanc's and which voice was Bergman; thus his vocal ability was established and his career launched.
:Bergman first voiced Bugs during the 1990 Academy Awards and then in Box Office Bunny, a 4-minute Looney Tunes short released in 1990 to commemorate Bugs' fiftieth anniversary. Bergman would next voice Bugs Bunny in the 1991 short (Blooper) Bunny, a Greg Ford-directed cartoon also produced to coincide with Bugs Bunny's fiftieth anniversary. However, the short never received its intended theatrical release and was shelved for years, until Cartoon Network rediscovered it and broadcast it on their channel several years later. Other works for which Bergman provided Bugs' voice include Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers (an obvious parody of the 1950s sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Tiny Toon Adventures (a popular television program of the early nineties that featured the classic Looney Tunes characters as mentors to their younger counterparts) in the first season, and Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue (a television special exposing children to dangers of illegal drugs). Bergman would continue to do the voice of Bugs Bunny until 1993. In 2010, for the first time in nearly a decade, Bergman will return to voice Bugs Bunny for Cartoon Network's upcoming series, The Looney Tunes Show.
;Greg Burson :Greg Burson first voiced Bugs in later episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures. He was then given the responsibility of voicing Bugs in 1995's Carrotblanca, a well-received 8-minute Looney Tunes cartoon originally shown in cinemas alongside The Amazing Panda Adventure (US) and The Pebble and the Penguin (non-US); it has since been released on video packaged with older Looney Tunes cartoons and was even included in the special edition DVD release of Casablanca, of which it is both a parody and an homage. Burson next voiced Bugs in the 1996 short From Hare to Eternity; the film is notable for being dedicated to the memory of the then-just deceased Friz Freleng, and for being the final Looney Tunes cartoon that Chuck Jones directed. Greg Burson also provided Bugs' voice in The Bugs and Daffy Show, which ran on Cartoon Network from 1996 to 2003. He died in 2008.
;Billy West :Billy West has been in television since the late 1980s. His first role was for the 1988 revived version of Bob Clampett's Beany and Cecil. West's breakthrough role then came almost immediately, as the voice of Stimpy and later Ren in John Kricfalusi's Ren & Stimpy. West has since been the voice talent for close to 120 different characters, including some of the most iconic animated figures in television history. Perhaps West's most notable film work came in the 1996 movie Space Jam. Starring alongside Michael Jordan, West provided the voice of both Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. West would go on to reprise the roles of Bugs in subsequent Looney Tunes productions, including his cameos on Histeria!, the Kids' WB! promotional spots, and the 2006 Christmas-themed special Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas and the DVD compilations "Reality Check" and "Stranger Than Fiction", along with several Looney Tunes-centric CDs, cartoons, and video games. Billy West is, along with fellow voice artist Joe Alaskey, credited as one of the current successors of Mel Blanc in impersonating the voice of Bugs Bunny.
;Joe Alaskey :Joe Alaskey, like Jeff Bergman, is well-known for his ability to successfully impersonate many Looney Tunes characters. In fact, Alaskey voiced Yosemite Sam in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as original voice actor Mel Blanc had found it too hard on his vocal cords. (This makes Sam one of the few voices created by Blanc to be voiced by someone else during his lifetime.) Joe Alaskey's first performance as Bugs Bunny came in the 2003 feature film Looney Tunes: Back in Action, although he had tested performing the role in a few earlier projects, such as Tweety's High-Flying Adventure. While still best known for providing the voice of Daffy Duck, Alaskey has also gone on to do Bugs' voice in several subsequent productions, including Daffy Duck for President (which was released on The and dedicated to then-just deceased Chuck Jones) and several recent video games and Looney Tunes cartoons, including Hare and Loathing in Las Vegas. Joe Alaskey is, along with fellow voice actor Billy West, credited as one of the current successors of Mel Blanc in impersonating the voice of Bugs Bunny.
;Jess Harnell :Jess Harnell served as the voice of Bugs in the Cartoon Network TV series Baby Looney Tunes.
;Noel Blanc :Noel Blanc, Mel Blanc's son, voiced Bugs for the Tiny Toons special It's a Wonderful Tiny Toon Christmas Special. The elder Blanc claimed in his later years that Noel substituted for Mel in various cartoon studios, including doing Bugs at Warner Bros., while he was recovering from a near-fatal car wreck. Noel can also be seen doing Bugs' voice with his father in the documentary on the making of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Bugs Bunny's enduring effect on comedic actors also cannot be overestimated. During an interview for Inside the Actors Studio, comedian Dave Chappelle cited Bugs Bunny as one of his earliest influences, praising voice actor Mel Blanc.
According to Time Warner, Bugs Bunny became the current official mascot for Six Flags theme parks beginning with their 45th anniversary.
Category:Corporate mascots Category:DC Comics titles Category:Dell Comics titles Category:Fictional anthropomorphic characters Category:Fictional characters from New York City Category:Fictional hares and rabbits Category:Gold Key Comics titles Category:Honorary United States Marines Category:Looney Tunes characters Category:Fictional characters introduced in 1940
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
