Bugs Bunny spends most of the cartoon harassing Elmer Fudd in a vaudeville/movie theatre, including pretending to be Elmer’s arms as he removes the hunter’s “cwothes” in a strip act on stage.
The next sequence has Bugs backstage dressing up as a southern-type sheriff.
Cut to Elmer on stage, curtain down. The “sheriff” approaches Fudd. “You’re under arrest for indecent southern exposure,” says the Yosemite Sam-like lawman. Cut to the “sheriff” with his rifle pointed at Fudd, taking him down the theatre aisle to “the hoosegow.”
Suddenly, we hear the Merrie Melodies theme. The “sheriff” turns around and the camera pans to a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Excitedly, he says to Fudd “I just dotes on that critter’s doin’s. Sit, son. I ain’t a-goin’ ta miss this’un!”
There’s a cut to Bugs on the screen, and then back to the lawman, jabbing Fudd with his elbow and slapping him, laughing “What a scalawag!”
Maltese’s plot takes a quick turn. Freleng cuts back to the screen that shows Bugs dressing up as the sheriff (in slightly different animation than before).
Fudd gets wise. “You’re the wabbit in disguise!” he declares and grabs the sheriff’s clothes. “Off with it, you twickster!”
But it really IS the sheriff. Anticipation and extreme below as Elmer grasps the situation.
“You’ll swing for this, suhr!” proclaims the sheriff as he and his gun follow Fudd out of the theatre.
“Hey, where did the sheriff come from? How come he’s there all of a sudden? What about Bugs?” I pondered as a young cartoon fan watching this in the 1960s. Then I decided, as Tex Avery once said, “anything can happen in one of these here cartoony pictures.”
It turns out Bugs is in a Leopold Stokowsky wig, conducting the pit orchestra. The cartoon ends with another radio reference as Bugs, emulating Jimmy Durante, tells us “Ah-ha-ha-ha! I gotta million of ‘em!”
Jack Bradbury is given the rotating animation screen credit.
Even as a kid, I thought, “It don't add up! It just don't add up!!
ReplyDelete