But once Tex Avery took the rabbit, had Bob Givens redesign him, got Mel Blanc to come up with a snazzier voice, avoided the unfunny self-mumbles and added strong comic routines, it was a whole new game. Warners quickly started referring to the Avery rabbit in the press as a brand-new character and demanded Leon Schlesinger’s staff to make more cartoons with the wise-ass, Givens-designed rabbit.
Here’s a great routine, one that Avery would never have tried after leaving Warners because his humour at MGM didn’t unfold slowly there; it was pretty much slam-bang/on-to-the-next-gag. The scene works because the audience wonders what it is the rabbit’s going to go. And Avery (with gagman Rich Hogan) built it brick by brick.
Elmer leaves bait for Bugs. (“Wabbits wuvv cawwots,” he reveals).
Cut to a close-up of the carrot and Bugs’ hand extending from the rabbit hole. The hand feels around, discovers the carrot, taps and strokes it with a finger. Now here’s a finger with personality!
Aha!
The hand grabs it. Zoom back down the hole.
Cut to Elmer racing to the hole and aiming his rifle. Cut again to the close-up. The hand feels around again, touched the gun, toings it with a finger to produce a gun-like metallic sound, retreats to the hole, then returns the mostly-eaten character to the ground, pats the gun barrel and the hand disappears.
That’s a good routine right there but Avery hasn’t finished milking it. After about a 24-frame pause, the hand emerges to reclaim its prize. Elmer lowers the gun as Carl Stalling plays a horn stab for emphasis. The hand taps a finger as if deciding what to do next. Then the fingers walk past the carrot to “While Strolling Through the Park One Day” before the hand suddenly backhands the vegetable and goes back into the hole.
Virgil Ross is credited with the animation in the short. Whether these scenes are his, or Bob McKimson’s, or someone else’s, I don’t know.
If you haven’t had enough of Bugs’ birthday, read what we posted for the wabbit’s 75th in this post.
As Greg Ford pointed out in his commentary on "A Wild Hare" the beautiful thing about the scene is we're 2:20 into the cartoon before Bugs spins his head out of the rabbit hole, but Avery's already established him as the Bugs Bunny we know today, through the interactions with the gun, the hand and the carrot. And the scene itself then demanded a different, more sharper voice for Tex's rabbit than the goofy, rube one Mel gave him for Ben Hardaway and which Jones continued to use, even as he made Elmer the bunny's natural foil.
ReplyDeletePretty amazing that the most significant cartoon of Avery's career is a measured even restrained film with humor based entirely on characterization. You're right nothing remotely like this would come out of Tex's unit at M.G.M. And, yes, that's some of the best hand-acting in all animation history!
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