Happy Birthday, Bugs Bunny

[Auggie]

Bugs Bunny first appeared on July 27, 1940 in the short, A Wild Hare



Here’s how the world’s favorite cartoon rabbit came to be. Animator Chuck Jones gave credit to Tex Avery for the character, but Warner Bros. had made several rabbit cartoons in the studio’s earlier years. There were cutesy rabbits and wacky rabbits, but those rabbits aren’t Bugs. (One distinction, Jones explained, was that Bugs’ craziness always serves a purpose–in contrast to the unhinged Daffy Duck.)

The Wild Hare bunny is uncredited, though that changed before the year was up. Bugs was an instant star. By 1954, TIME noted that he was more popular than Mickey Mouse. (Mel Blanc, who voiced the character, later claimed that the name was his idea, saying that they were going to call the character Happy Rabbit, but that Blanc suggested naming him after animator Ben “Bugs” Hardaway. Alternatively, the name is sometimes traced to a sketch that designer Charles Thorson did on Hardaways’ request, with the caption “Bugs’ bunny”—as in, it was the bunny that Bugs had asked him to draw.)

Though Virgil Ross was the animator on A Wild Hare, Chuck Jones became one of the more famous hands behind the Bugs Bunny magic. In 1979, when The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie came out, TIME critic Richard Schickel noted that “it is possible that some day Animator Chuck Jones may come to be regarded as the American Bunuel” for the fact that Jones and the groundbreaking surrealist filmmaker so well understood the psychological underpinnings of comedy.

http://time.com/3967572/bugs-bunny-75/

[Gidney N Cloyd]

1. The stuff they're doing currently on "The LooneyToons Show" is such a pale imitation.

[infidel dog]

2. love Bugs, loathe Chuck.

Chuck Jones did some decent work when he was under control. When given total creative license-after 1948 or so-he wrecked Warner Bros. animation. Cutesy characters-did Bugs Bunny really need to look like a concentration camp escapee with long eyelashes, Chuck?-abstract backgrounds and hackneyed, formulaic scrips didn't cut it with me. Still don't, in fact. Chuck Jones is the lucky beneficiary of really good press from myopic animation fans who wouldn't know from Tex Avery and Bob McKimson if they, well, were run over by a streetcar. And no, I don't care if children reeeeally like Tweetie Bird. Kids will happily eat chicken nuggets with mac and cheese seven days a week if you let them. And it's fine with me if they do.

[Auggie]

3. Disagree

Jones pushed the envelope as all artists should and brought added dimension to Looney Toons. Characters have to grow and develop or else they become stale.

Consider, too, Jones was doing the best he could as a result of budget cuts at Warner Bros., especially the later work. From wiki:

After the verdict of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust case in 1948 ended the practice of "block booking", Warner Bros. could no longer force theaters into buying their features and shorts together as packages; shorts had to be sold separately. Theater owners were only willing to pay so much for cartoon shorts, and as a result by the late-1950s the budgets at Warner Bros. Cartoons became tighter. Selzer forced a stringent five-week production schedule on each cartoon (at least one director, Chuck Jones, cheated the system by spending more time on special cartoons such as What's Opera Doc, less time on simpler productions such as Road Runner entries, and had his crew forge their time cards). With less money for full animation, the Warner Bros. story men — Michael Maltese, Tedd Pierce, and Warren Foster — began to focus more of their cartoons on dialogue. While story artists were assigned to directors at random during the 1930s and 1940s, by the 1950s each story man worked almost exclusively with one director: Maltese with Jones, Foster with Freleng, and Pierce with McKimson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Cartoons

[47of74]

4. Yep! Happy Birthday Bugs Bunny

Happy Birthday Bugs Bunny!


Thanks for doing us a solid in cutting off Florida!