The Persistence of Bugs Bunny : Take 2

by Cal Meacham

Mickey Mouse is supposed by some to be the Great American Cultural Cartoon Icon, but I think that a better case can be made for Bugs Bunny. Certainly I have seen a great many more Bugs Bunny cartoons than Mickey Mouse cartoons - Disney parcels out Mickey in small doses, reserving Mickey for a few special occasions. Most of his older cartoons are locked away in the Disney vaults, showing up occasionally in video collections or flitting across the screen of The Disney Channel in the early morning hours. It sometimes seems as if the popularity of the famous mouse is the result of good publicity, rather than good cartoons.

Bugs, on the other hand, appeared in cartoon after cartoon, racked up against each other on Saturday and Sunday mornings, on The Bugs Bunny Show, on kids’ shows and in movie retrospectives at art cinemas. Warner Brothers was profligate with the rabbit, holding almost none of his cartoons back from TV and video release. Even the “forbidden” Bugs Bunny cartoons, with subjects that are now considered offensive, have been shown in art cinemas. I’ve never seen the “forbidden” Disney cartoons.

Bugs was tough, street-wise, and clever. It wasn’t just a matter of mysteriously pulling already-fused and lit sticks of dynamite out of nowhere to foist upon a dim-witted Elmer Fudd. That was just the icing on the cake. Bugs was resourceful, able to improvise or to talk his way out of a tight situation. If there was one cartoon character you would have wanted to be, it was Bugs. Mickey Mouse, by comparison, seemed to simple and good-hearted. He was able to get the best of Peg-Leg Pete, or the Giant in “The Little Tailor”, but you could tell it was touch and go. When Bugs came up against a giant, there was no doubt that he was going to win, out-smarting and out-maneuvering the big clod.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that Bugs was like the Trickster character in so many mythologies. Raven in the Pacific Northwest and Anansi in Sub-Saharan Africa and even Odysseus (Ulysses) in Greece. Ready liars, “full of twists and turns”, always ready with an angle. Then it occurred to me that many of these Trickster types are themselves rabbits - Hare in Africa, who became Br’er Rabbit in the American South, Rabbit in the American Southeast and Southwest, and Brother Rabbit and Judge Rabbit in Southeast Asia. Could this all be coincidence? Had the Warner Bothers cartoon directors and Gag Men tapped into the Collective Unconscious? Or were they consciously adapting the stories of the Trickster Rabbits of the world? Or was there some sort of story-telling dynamic that naturally forced stories into this form, so that the Rabbit was somehow inevitable?

I’ve come across lot of writings and websites that acknowledge the Trickster Rabbit/Bugs Bunny resemblance, but they usually pass it off after a brief comment. Yeah, Bugs Bunny tricks his enemies, and so does Trickster Rabbit. So What? Bugs’ adventures are completely different. The Gag Men weren’t anthropologists, they just worked with what they knew. What more do you need?

Well, a lot more, I think. It’s a legitimate question to ask why we in the 20th and 21st centuries have, as our chief character of amusing stories something so very close to the heroes of stories from so many other cultures, and such old cultures, at that. Did Michael Maltese, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery copy these old stories, or not? If not, then why isn’t a Duck or a Squirrel or a Coyote the Hero of our Saturday mornings? And don’t worry, I don’t want this to turn into one of those deadly dull papers trying to plumb the psychological roots of cartoon characters, and killing the humor in the process. No cartoon rabbits were killed in the writing of this essay.

The Trickster figure is one that’s not really present in Christian theology or Christian Mythology. He works mischief, but not Evil. Sometimes he helps with the act of Creation. Sometimes he himself is the victim of a trick, as in the story of Anansi and the Rubber Girl (which became the story of the Tar Baby in Joel Chandler Harris). Western culture isn’t terribly comfortable with the Trickster and his moral ambiguity, and often tries to turn him into an unambiguously Evil figure. So when Stan Lee adapted Norse mythology for his Thor comic in the 1960s, Loki the Trickster became the Bad Guy.

As I mentioned above, it’s interesting that the Rabbit or Hare is the Trickster figure in so many cultures. He appears among the Native Americans in the SouthWest and the Southeast. Writing in North America Indian Mythology (Paul Hamlyn, 1965, p. 110), Cottie Burland says that “[The Creek Indians]…had a considerable influence on negro folk-tales, especially in the imposition of their own concept of the Trickster Spirit, personified as the Rabbit, on to the cycle of Ashanti stories about Anansi, The Trickster. In Jamaica Anansi suffers a spelling change and is often called Nancy, but in the south-eastern United States he took over the name of his Creek Indian archetype and has since charmed the world as Brer Rabbit.”

On the other hand, Geoffrey Parrinder writes, in African Mythology (Paul Hamlyn, 1967, p. 128): “All across Africa fables are told of the cleverness, deceit, and triumph of the Spider or the Hare, called by various names according to the language. These yarns were taken to America by the slaves and became the Brer Rabbit tales related by Uncle Remus. There are no rabbits in tropical Africa, and the clever animal is really a hare, which depends upon its speed and cunning to protect itself against the dangers of the open Sudan and savannah country. Its chief enemy is the hyena, the Brer Fox of the American versions.” On the whole, I’d have to tip in favor of Parrinder’s claims for an African origin for the Brer Rabbit tales - the stories themselves are the same as those in Joel Chandler Harris’ Tales of Uncle Remus. The American stories are not. It’s possible that the American stories influenced the African ones, as Burland suggests, but there was already an African Hare to provide the influence to turn Anansi the Spider into Brer Rabbit without those stories. I suspect that the rabbit-as-trickster was an independent development in Africa and the Americas.

Rabbit as Trickster shows up in Mayan and in South American mythology, too, and in Cambodia, as well (see http://curriculum.becta.org.uk/literacy/reading/term2/term2_year3.html and http://www.nwlink.com/~spagnoli/books/picturebk.htm.) Curiously, he is absent from ancient European lore. You’d expect Trickster Rabbit to show up in Aesop’s Fables. But he doesn't. In Aesop, Rabbits are timid and not very clever souls. In Europe the Fox and sometimes the Bear are Trickster figures. The closest the rabbit approaches to the Trickster is in his tale of The Tortoise and the Hare, where the two creatures decide to have a race to determine who is the faster. The Hare, confident of victory, goes to sleep. The Tortoise simply kept on walking, until he arrived at the finish line as the Hare slept. The moral is usually given as Slow and Steady wins the Race, although Aesop is typically more long-winded than this. “’Up and be doing’ is an edifying text; for action is the business of life….”

Why do so many cultures have the Trickster Rabbit? The first answer that comes to mind for similarities between cultures is diffusion - he idea is passed from one culture to a neighboring one. In he case of Trickster Rabbit, though, it’s unlikely that the idea could jump from Africa to Cambodia. When the same idea emerges in areas widely separated in time and space, we must look or a different cause. (This was the case with the Medusa face, and its use for the same purposes around the world. The Gorgoneion is used as a shield device in ancient Greece, among the classic Maya, and today among the Iatmul in New Guinea. See my book Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon.)

In trying to explain why coyotes are Trickster figures in Native American mythology, Structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that the opposition between Agriculture and Warfare corresponds to the dichotomy between Life and Death (Structural Anthropology, 1963, p. 224.) The mediator between agriculture and warfare is Hunting (a life-sustaining war against animals.) Since agriculture is associated with peaceful herbivores and hunting with beasts of prey, animals tend to fall into a dichotomy of herbivores/carnivores. The mediator between these groups is a animal that is neither - a scavenger that doesn’t kill what it eats. As it mediates between herbivores and carnivores, it mediates between Life and Death and between Good and Evil. And so Coyotes and Ravens are Tricksters.

This explanation is long-winded, and not convincing. As Marvin Harris points out (Cultural Materialism, 1979, pp. 200-201), the coyote isn’t a scavenger, but a wily predator himself. “Non-Indian as well as Indian observers agree that the coyote is an extremely cunning carnivore who has to compensate for being small by being smart,” writes Harris. He drives the point home with citations from naturalists, and listing the scientific names for subspecies of coyote - names that translate as “Tricky Coyote” and “Cagey Coyote”.

What applies to the Coyote (and the Raven) applies to the Rabbit, as well. The rabbit may not be a carnivore, but it has to compensate for its small size and weak armament by being clever. “Probably based on the actual antics of live rabbits, trickster rabbits epitomize the craftiness of these small creatures forced to use deceptive techniques to survive,” notes Clowns and Tricksters: An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture (Kimberley A. Christen, ed. ABC-CLIO books, 1998).

Before finishing this section up, I’d like to note Richard Adams’ book Watership Down, a novel about a group of rabbits and their search for a new warren. Adams creates a entire culture and mythology for his rabbits, filled with the Trickster antics of el-elhrair-rah, The Prince with Thousand Enemies. It fills the rabbit-shaped gap in European Trickster Lore.

So people around the world have told stores of Trickster rabbits, probably based on observations of the real cleverness of rabbits. We all admire a good story, and want to be clever, so the survival and transmission of these stories aren’t surprising. But how do we get from this ancient and oral tradition to the celluloid doings of a street-wise urban bunny?

Warner Brothers opened its cartoon studio in 1930, and its first character was “Bosko, the Talk-ink Kid” and his girlfriend Honey. There were a few abortive attempts to introduce animal characters - Foxy and his girlfriend, who looked like a studied attempt to plagiarize Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse; Piggy and Fluffy, a couple of pigs hat never caught on; Goopy Geer, who looks unnervingly like Disney’s Goofy. But for the most part Bosko and Honey held down the fort, aided by Buddy (another human) later on.

In 1935 they tried out a lot of animal characters in one cartoon - “I Haven’t Got Hat”. Little Kitty, Oliver Owl, two puppy twins named Ham and Ex, a pig named Porky and a cat named Beans (Porky and Beans, get it?) They tried some of these characters in various combinations afterwards - Ham and Ex, Beans alone, Ham and Ex and Beans, and, of course, Pork and Beans. By whatever mystical means, they decided that Porky was the standout, and he got his own cartoon in 1936, “The Blow Out”, directed by Tex Avery. Warner finally had a cartoon star. Porky appeared in 13 cartoons that year, 16 the next, and 17 in 1938. Porky never as your typical pig - he acted like a human being, holding various jobs or running farm.

To build up their stable of characters, they tried pairing Porky with other characters. Most of them were misfires (Gabby Goat?), but in “Porky’s Duck Hunt” (released April 17, 1938) Tex Avery hit on a new character and a new comic situation, both of which would become important standbys for the studio. The situation was The Hunter and his Prey, and the character was Daffy Duck. Daffy (unnamed in this first cartoon - the model sheet calls him “The Crazy Darnfool Duck”) didn’t react in the usual fashion of extreme fear, but with exuberant craziness. “He doesn’t care,” wrote Joe Adamson, analyzing the cartoon in Tex Avery: King of Cartoons. “He thinks it’s funny. And his cavalier attitude toward the earnest fellow who is supposed to be hunting him down really is funny. This is seven leagues from anything a cartoon character of the thirties was supposed to be, and just the sort of thing Disney would never let one of his directors try.”

It was an important event for Warners, because Daffy was immediately successful, and the hunter formula was as well, being repeated endlessly in the years afterwards. It also provided a foot in the door for yet another character. At long last, we come to the elusive Rabbit.

The birth of Bugs Bunny gets pretty tangled when you try to sort out all the conflicting claims. It all started with a lengthy and (to some) glory-grabbing interview of Clampett in the cartoon magazine “Funnyworld” in 1975. This flared out in public with the release of the movie Bugs Bunny Superstar in 1975 (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0072751), in which animator Bob Clampett presented the early years of Bugs Bunny. He claimed to have invented him during a conversation with director Rudy Ising in 1931, added the carrot-munching after seeing Clark Gable’s performance in It Happened One Night, and helped Tex Avery during the early development. A lot of the old Warner Brothers animators thought Clampett took way too much credit for the creation of Bugs Bunny. They responded with The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Movie (1979) (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078915), which pointed showed the work of other animators. Chuck Jones also circulated a letter among film buffs and animators in 1975 denouncing Clampett’s claims, with additional commentary from Tex Avery.

I know that I’m not well versed enough in this to untangle the Gordian Knot of credit, but here’s my feeble attempt. Warners followed up Porky’s Duck Hunt with Porky’s Hare Hunt, released April 30, 1938. It was obviously in production while the former cartoon was, and clearly wasn’t done in reaction to the favorable response to the Duck Hunt picture. According to Adamson, it used leftover gags from Porky’s Duck Hunt, so it arguably wouldn’t be as good. Also, Avery couldn’t very well direct both simultaneously. The direction was handled by Ben “Bugs” Hardaway (and, according to Adamson, assisted by Cal Dalton).

According to voice-master Mel Blanc (who provided most of the Warners characters with their distinctive voices - and certainly all of the famous ones), he was the one who suggested that the rabbit be called “Bugs Bunny”.

“They were going to call him “The Happy Rabbit,” said Blanc in an interview. “So I told Mr. [Leon] Schlesinger [head of the Warner’s cartoon unit] “Why don’t you name him after the guy who drew the first picture? Bugs Hardaway. Call him Bugs Bunny instead of The Happy Rabbit.” (“A Chat with Mel Blanc” by Peter Stamelan, in The American Animated Cartoon , ed. Danny and Gerald Peary, Dutton, 1980).

“This is the first Bugs Bunny model sheet,” said director Chuck Jones, presenting interviewer Joe Adamson with the sheet in an interview for the American Film Institute circa 1980. “ Notice that it says “Bugs’ Bunny” - possessive. The name Bugs came from Bugs Hardaway, who we can safely say did the first Bugs Bunny who was called Bugs Bunny. But saying “This is the first Bugs Bunny” has no meaning. What is important is how Bugs came to stand and move and act, and what his feelings are, and his thoughts, an what kind of personality he is. That developed over a period of time.” (reprinted in Peary and Peary, 1980).

Director Robert McKimson was more blunt. “Actually, a lot of people give credit to Bugs Hardaway for creating Bugs Bunny. But to me, he had no part in it. He had a completely different character. It was called Bugs’ Bunny. If it had been a horse, it would have been Bugs’ horse.” (“Robert McKimson Interviewed” by Mark Nardone in Peary and Peary, 1980).

Adamson, writing in Tex Avery, noted that Hardaway and Dalton “managed to misdirect the character so thoroughly that he was more annoying to the audience than he was to his antagonist.” Despite years of cartoon watching, I must admit that I am thoroughly unfamiliar with the overall career and work of Bugs Hardaway. But I have seen “Porky’s Hare Hunt” and the next cartoon featuring the character, “Hare-um Scare-um” (also directed by Hardaway), and I have to agree. This isn’t at all the Bugs Bunny we know and love, and arguably not even him in embryonic form. His laugh is aggravating and un-Bugs-like, his style totally unlike true Bugs. If this was all we had, the character would never become an Icon or won an Academy Award. Adamson claims that the cartoons did indeed star a “fearless rabbit who bolixed up all attempts to murder him, on a design fashioned by Bob Clampett..” , which gives a slight justification to Clampett’s clams, but considering that the character and style were so very different, it’s not much. McKimson claimed to have drawn all the original sketches for Bugs.

(Just for the record, this is the only case I know of -- outside, arguably, from The Addams Family - where an animated character has been named after his creator. “Bugs”, by the way, is short for “Bughouse”. That is, an insane asylum, and it implies “Crazy”. An appropriate name for a crazy rabbit. Although I think I can see why mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was less than pleased with his nickname.)

In 1940 Chuck Jones directed Elmer’s Candid Camera, the first pairing of Bugs and Elmer. Surprisingly, it’s still not the Bugs we are familiar with (even though Jones would become one of Bugs’ best directors.)

By all accounts, the cartoon that crystallized Bugs Bunny was A Wild Hare (released July 27,1940), directed by Tex Avery, who had done Porky’s Duck Hunt. For the first time, Elmer Fudd hunts Bugs Bunny. This is the confident, composed Bugs we know, not the silly rabbit of previous cartoons. Confident, always in control, and ready with his trademark “What’s up, Doc?” The cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award.

So I pause here to note that the very idea of hunter-vs.-prey in Warners cartoons seems to come from Tex Avery, and that he was the one who first put a recognizable Bugs Bunny in that situation. Where did he get the idea from? The cartoonists, animators and directors of the old Warner Brothers cartoons adamantly insist that Bugs’ thematic ancestors weren’t characters from myths, but from the vaudeville stage and the movies - the Marx brothers and other great comedians of the era. Who can gainsay them?

Well, I will. As proof, I offer the next Tex Avery Bugs Bunny cartoon (Note: There was one Bugs Bunny cartoon between A Wild Hare and this one - Chuck Jones’ 1941 Elmer’s Pet Rabbit.), Tortoise Beats Hare, released March 15, 1941. One can’t help think that the choice of subject wasn’t influenced by the fact that Disney had released a Silly Symphony on January 5, 1935 entitled The Tortoise and the Hare (http://www.bcdb.com/bcdb/detailed.cgi?film=3937) , which retold the story from Aesop (noted above in this essay). As Avery himself has remarked, Bugs Bunny’s physical appearance (although not his character) owes a lot to Max Hare’s appearance in the Disney cartoon. “Mr. Disney was polite enough never to mention it,” remarked Avery in an interview with Adamson, “because he didn’t have to. People had been copying him for years, his bears and everything else, but he never did complain. He evidently looked at us as parasites. But if you look back, why, my goodness, there’s a rabbit that looked a heck of a lot like Bugs Bunny, as far as the drawing goes. But he wasn’t Bugs without the gags that we gave him.” (“You Couldn’t get Charlie Chaplin in a Milk Bottle” interview of Tex Avery by Joe Adamson, June 19, 1969; November 13, 1969; and March 25, 1971. In Adamson’s book Tex Avery: King of Cartoons )

Characteristically, Avery’s cartoon Tortoise Beats Hare breaks the usual conventions. The title card appears, bearing the cartoon title and lead credits. But instead of launching into the cartoon, the title card stays up after the intro music finishes, and a carrot-chomping Bugs appears to read the credits aloud, mispronouncing the names. (“Fred A-very”), losing his temper when he finally gets to the title (“Tortoise Beats Hare. TORTOISE BEATS HARE?! Why these screwy guys don’t know what they’re talkin’ about! Why, the big bunch of joiks, and I oughta know! I woik for ‘em!”). He rips away the title like cardboard, and finds Cecil Turtle waiting for him. He immediately challenges him to a race.

Bugs zooms away, but Cecil calmly goes over to a telephone and calls his cousin Chester, asking him to "get the boys together and to give the rabbit the works”. Chester and the other turtles, who resemble Cecil perfectly, set themselves up along the route, showing up everywhere Bugs goes, despite the barricades and obstacles Bugs throws up to thwart the turtle. He puts on a final burst of speed, to find Cecil waiting at the finish line. “Hey, Speedy, what kept ya?” asks the victorious turtle. Bugs is flabbergasted (“What th-… How did y-…”), but finally pays up the $10 bet. (“And I hope ya choke!”) he says, with ill grace, making a face. As he walks off he muses “I wonder if I’ve been tricked?” He turns around to see ten identical turtles say “It’s a possibility!” (A catchphrase stolen from a popular radio show), and kiss him.

The first thing that should be obvious is that this is not the story as Aesop tells it. This is no “slow and steady wins the race”, as in the Disney version. It’s a tale of deceit and trickery - and Bugs comes off worst! Is this a serious attempt to undermine the sweetness and light of the wholesome Disney? Is it the streetwise Warners characters perverting a classic tale?

Nope.

This is the standard version of the story as told in sub-Saharan Africa. The story is told, for instance in Geoffrey Parrinder’s African Mythology (cited above. The story of the Tortoise ad the Hare appears on p. 134) “[The Hare] challenged the Tortoise to a foot race which he knew he could win. The Tortoise agreed, but said he as too tired that day and it would have to be the next morning. Then he went home and collected all his family, and spent the night placing them along the road and telling them what to do. Next morning the Hare and the Tortoise started off together and the Hare was soon far ahead. He called back “Tortoise”, and to his surprise heard a voice ahead saying, “I am here.” The same happened all along the road, and since it was circular, when the Hare arrived panting he found the original Tortoise calmly sitting waiting for him.” All Avery had to do was add the dialogue and the sight gags.

Avery wasn’t an expert on African folktales. How did this bit end up as a Bugs Bunny cartoon? The missing link, I suggest, was Uncle Remus. Joel Chandler Harris was not, I hasten to point out, the only recorder of American Black Folklore and Folktales. There were plenty of accounts in scholarly publications. He wasn’t even the only or even the first popularizer of these tales. But he was the best-known, and most popular. As noted above, many of the Uncle Remus tales (named after the character of the avuncular slave who tells these stories to the seven year old white boy who is the point-of-view character in these books) derive directly from these old African tales, with some minor changes in the animals. The story of the Tortoise and the Hare comes from the very first Uncle Remus book: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, first published in 1880. It is the eighteenth tale, “Mr. Rabbit Finds His Match at Last”, and it is rendered in excruciating dialect. I give only a brief example:

“…Ole Brer Tarrypin, he lay low in de swamp. He had a wife en th’ee chiluns, old Brer Tarrypin did, en ey wuz all de ve’y spit en image er de ole man. Ennybody w’at know one fum de udder gotter take a spy-glass, en den dey er li’ble fer ter git fooled.

“Dat’s de way marters stan’ twel de day er de race, en on dat day, ole Brer Tarrypin, en his ole ‘oman, en his th’ee chilluns, dey got up ‘fo’ sun-up, en went ter de place. De ole ‘oman, she tuck ‘er stan’ nigh de fus’ mile-pos’, she did, en de chilluns nigh de udders, up ter der las’, en dar old Brer Tarrypin, he tuck his stan’….”

(I can only take so much of that. Yet Harris’ stories of Uncle Remus were incredibly popular. He eventually wrote nine books, and they went through multiple printings. They’re still in print, in fact. Yet, to quote L. Sprague de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook: “Although phonetic spelling was common in fiction in the last century, as in Kipling’s Indian stories, it is now undesirable, save in very small doses, because readers who have learned sight reading fail to recognize the respelled words at first glance and have to go back and puzzle them out. English is a poor language with which to play spelling games, because its spelling is so ambiguous that even the reader who reads by syllables cannot always tell what sounds the respelled words are trying to indicate.”)

The identity of the African folktale with the Brer Rabbit Tale with the Bug Bunny cartoon is far too similar to be coincidence. It seems very likely that Avery was either a big fan of the Brer Rabbit stories of Harris, or else knew them more directly through the oral tradition. Everyone who talks about Avery agrees that he was himself characterized by that Texas exuberance and sense of exaggeration in storytelling. “The biggest clue you will find, in fact, to the origin of the state of Tex Avery’s humor is the humor of the state of Tex Avery’s origin,” wrote Joe Adamson in Tex Avery. “It was Texas that gave birth to the most widespread and influential form of American folk humor, the tall tale.”

“ You know, he’s a cowboy at heart…” opined gag man Heck Allen. “I was born and raised in Jackson County, Missouri; he was born and raised in Taylor, Texas. When we were growing up in our particular home towns, they were rural, and the type of things that’s treated nostalgically today in literature by writers like MacKinley Cantor, who write of the small-town America. It really existed at one time. Anyone your age wouldn’t believe it, they’d have to see pictures. We’d sit there all day long and amuse each other with tales of Taylor, Texas or Jackson or Clay County, Missouri…. He was born in a small town called Taylor, Texas, which I in mid-Texas, and came out here as boy. His hobby is racing pigeons. He loves animals; his daughter is genuine zoophile.”

Avery - whose real name was Fred Bean Avery - was a lineal descendant of the legendary Judge Roy Bean. Judge Bean’s real name, in turn, was Boone, and he was a descendant of Daniel Boone. Legend ran in Tex Avery’s veins. A boy of rural Texas, brought up in the south and western tradition of story-telling, a lover of animals and their ways, it would be surprising indeed if he wasn’t aware of the tales of Brer Rabbit.

To me, the most surprising part of it all is the realization that the Warner Brothers cartoon did not tell the traditional Aesop version, but that it told a completely different version, and one with impressive literary roots. I don’t know of any studies on possible links between Aesop’s story and the African tale. Which came first? Why did Aesop (and Disney) go with the straightforward and more strictly moral (but rather dull) version? The African version offends our moral sense. “But, Uncle Remus,” said the little boy, dolefully, “that was cheating.” protests the boy in the Uncle Remus tales. And so it was, and offensive to the public morals. But it is true to the spirit of Trickster. And a hell of a lot more fun.

What happened afterwards in the world of Warners cartoons is interesting. Avery directed two more Bugs Bunny cartoons. All This and Rabbit Stew is rarely shown anymore, because the hunter is an unfortunate caricature of a black man. Although it was the last of Avery’s Warner cartoons to be released, that was surely a fluke (it originally didn’t have his name on it). The officially next-to-last cartoon, The Heckling Hare, was the cause for Avery’s dismissal from the studio. Avery wanted to end it with Bugs and the dopey dog falling off the cliff again. According to Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Guide to the Warner Bothers Cartoons, “Leon Schlesinger, who normally stayed out of the creative end, objected to the idea of his newest star ending in death. He ordered the final 40 feet cut, which caused a argument between Schlesinger and Avery. Avery was suspended, then fired.” Avery went on to a successful career at MGMs cartoon division.

In his absence, almost all the other Warners cartoonists took a try at Bugs. Friz Freleng gave Bugs Yosemite Sam as a new opponent. Bob Clampett himself did several Bugs Bunny cartoons, and his last cartoon with Warners was also a Bugs Bunny cartoon - 1946’s The Big Snooze. After that Clampett went on to his own puppet projects. Chuck Jones did several, including Hair Raising Hare, the one that introduced Gossamer, the hairy orange monster (see my essay “Monster Mash”, in the last issue of Teemings). Frank Tashlin did a few Bugs Bunny cartoons before leaving animation altogether to direct live-action movies.

One thing I find surprising is that even Avery - who had Bugs bested by Cecil Turtle - claimed that Bugs was always the winner. Adamson says of Tortoise Beats Hare that it was “a misguided effort” because of that. Yet it was not at all unknown for Bugs to be beaten in his early cartoons (just as Trickster Rabbit was beaten often his stories). Clampett has the Gremlin besting Bugs in 1943s Falling Hare. The Tortoise wins again in Tortoise Wins by a Hare (also Clampett, 1943) and again in Rabbit Transit (1947, directed by Freleng). Elmer actually gets the best of Bugs in Freleng’s 1942 cartoon The Hare-Brained Hypnotist. But it’s also true that these cartoons were in the minority. Bugs usually beat his opponents handily. With the departure of so many responsible for the early development of Bugs in the 1940s - Hardaway, Avery, Tashlin, and Clampett - the subsequent development of Bugs was left to others. Robert McKimson, who has not received the credit that he is due, worked on Bugs all along, and was responsible for appearance. He was the one who finally re-vamped Bugs from the oval-headed Roman-nosed character to the warm fuzzy bunny with furry cheeks. Friz Freleng probably did more Bugs Bunny cartoons than anyone else, and gave us Yosemite Sam and the Tasmanian Devil. But arguably the biggest influence was Chuck Jones, who really came into his own in the late 1940s and early fifties, bringing an intellectualism to the Bugs Bunny cartoons and re-shaping the characters into the forms the have today. It’s because of Jones that Daffy Duck became a shallow, hot-headed poser, Porky Pig became a straightforward and stalworth character, and Bugs Bunny became the Super Trickster, never defeated. Jones’ Bugs didn’t capriciously go after anyone. He minded his own business until provoked, then declared “Of course you realize This Means War!” (a line that benefited from Mel Blanc’s deadpan delivery.) Bugs first used the line in Jones’ 1941 cartoon Elmer’s Pet Rabbit. Other cartoon directors - Bob McKimson, Friz Freleng, Gerry Chiniquy - have followed Jones’ lead in this. Since 1950, I don’t think Bugs has been bested by any opponent. Our Bugs Bunny has gone beyond the traditional Trickster to become unbeatable.