Wabbit Twouble
Hey kids (of all ages), it’s Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!
We covered the development of Egghead (more specifically, his running-gag ‘brother’ Elmer) into the fully-recognizable Elmer J. Fudd in last Saturday’s upload. But sometimes creators just don’t know when to stop! After Elmer’s star-making role with Bugs Bunny, who had finally evolved into his proper physical and vocal form, in A WILD HARE, the boys at Termite Terrace decided it would be funny to fatten Elmer up to resemble his voice actor, Arthur Q. Bryan. It wasn’t. So the chunky Elmer devolved back into his earlier, slimmer version after a handful of pictures.
But Elmer wasn’t the only one evolving at this point. Bugs pretty much looked and sounded like his iconic self, but his personality was still not fully formed. As with the proto-Bugs seen in last week’s upload, we find the wabbit going out of his way to screw-with a peaceable Elmer without any provocation whatsoever. Chuck Jones would soon realize that this sort of thing basically made Bugs a jerk. Thereafter, he normally had to be either threatened or outright attacked, sometimes repeatedly, before borrowing Groucho’s “This means WAR!” line and taking hilarious revenge on the offending party.
From 1941 (less two weeks after Pearl Harbor) WABBIT TWOUBLE. More from OldHorseman.
