Giovanni takes his bow. Bugs decides to get a last lick in. Chuck Jones shows his love for silent film as these frames tell the story.
The cartoon ends the way it started, with Bugs and his banjo.
The smear animation is by Ben Washam. Lloyd Vaughan, Phil Monroe and Ken Harris also animated this wonderful cartoon, with backgrounds by Pete Alvarado from layouts by Bob Gribbroek.
One of the many examples of Warners taking a plot like that worked before -- in this case, with Jones' "Case of the Missing Hare" -- and improving it by speeding up the timing, using sharper poses and ironing out some of the rough spots in the original story (though during its network run, I never could figure out why the censors had them take out the Bobbysoxer-dynamite pen sequence, even before they really started clamping down on violent gags).
ReplyDeleteSomebody thought modern kids wouldn't know what a bobbysoxer was, perhaps. Or they wanted a few extra seconds for more commercials.
DeleteThey also removed the head in the harp gag featured in part one of this post. Really jarring edit, as I recall.
DeleteDynamite masqueraded as pens does not meet the approval of the network censors. Neither does slamming a harp shut on a rabbit's neck, smashing a banjo over a rabbit's head, or tying a rabbit's ears to a branch and snapping the rabbit back and forth.
DeleteThe violent attacks on Bugs musical efforts by Giovanni vanished during the cartoon's Saturday morning run in the 1970s. The Bobbysoxer/pen gag was gone when the short was being run on ABC a decade earlier. That's the odd part, that some ABC censor would decide that gag the one where the line was drawn even before the Action for Children's Television people started making their voices heard on Sixth Avenue (and I'd agree it might have been cut to avoid dating the cartoon, but for the longest time they left in the gag at the end of "Frigid Hare", which clearly gave away that the cartoon wasn't 'new').
DeleteWhen I finally saw the cartoon from open to close, from Bugs head to That's All Folks close, on Nick, I was surprised to see the bobbysoxer gag (with the second ref, after the obligatory Frankie one, the Perry Como one, being really dated or confusing, since Como hadn't been a "matinee idol" for years--much like, I supposed, a 1930s Rudy Vallee scene) on there...but Howard's rightas about the dynamite. Rabbits shouldn't carry exploding pens LOl.
DeleteBTW this is a classic, especially the part detailed (Giovanni getting on the ground and banging it to keep the momentum and stamini of his "AAAAAA" belting.)
PS The voice of the opera singer was identified on Mark Evanier's blog in 2000 in turn reprinting one of his Comics Buyers Guide article to be a singer named Nicholai Shutorov, in turn thanks to Keith Scott (still the formeost authority on the topic in the way that Paul Mandell is the one who is the authority on TV stock music themes..).SC
8/26/15
ReplyDeleteRobGems.ca Wrote:
I thought it was annoying too when both CBS and ABC made censor cuts from "Long Haired Hare" as well. As for "Frigid Hare", censors won't put up with Bugs tormenting a knuckle-brained Eskimo today, much less with Bugs calling him an "Eskimo Pie-head" for racist reasons. The PC Police don't make much noise about Bugs tormenting a (possible?) Italian-American tenor like Giovanni Jones, though.