Friday 9 January 2015
Rabbit and Costello
Elmer Fudd quits cartoons in “The Big Snooze” (1946). Bugs begs him to consider. “T’ink what we’ve been to each other. Why, we’ve been like Rabbit and Costello. Damon and Runyon. Stan and Laurel!” Note the crooked fingers in the last drawing. Bugs does that in a number of drawings in this scene.
Who wrote the lines? Beats me. The writer and director aren’t credited. The director is, of course, Bob Clampett. The writer could have been his buddy, Mike Sasanoff, who quit cartoons to go into ad agency work. I do like the play on Damian and Pythias. The credited animators are Manny Gould, Izzy Ellis, Bill Melendez and Rod Scribner.
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This is at least in part, Rod Scribner's work, especially the portion where he tears Elmer's underwear off.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that this was Clampett's first released Bugs cartoon in over a year, at a time when in general, the studio couldn't pump out enough of them. Bob's cartoons of 1944 (without Warren Foster as writer) had him as the unprovoked aggressor at the outset of the cartoon, which wasn't how the other directors were using him -- here Bob devises a nice work-around in that we simply open with the by-now-familiar Bugs-Elmer chase and don't have to explain why Bugs is being chased by Elmer. So once Elmer walks off the job, the audience's sympathies is completely with the rabbit.
ReplyDeleteA nice way to go out at the studio.