What? How? Why?

While being chased across the U.S. by Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny skids to a stop and gets “that funny feeling” that gold is nearby (in reused animation). Sam can’t any chances in case he’s not being tricked again, so he starts a-diggin’.



But it is no trick. Sam discovers Bugs’ feeling was right.



The camera pulls back.



Wait a minute! That “Fort Knox” sign wasn’t in the shot before this. Where did it come from?

Well, the answer’s simple. If writer Warren Foster had it planted at the outset, it would have ruined the reveal gag. So he and background man Irv Wyner left it out. This bothered me as a kid. A sign can’t show up on a lawn out of nowhere.

The ending bothered me, too. “And what are YOU doing here?” an MP asks Bugs.



“Oh, me?” nervously answers the rabbit. “Well, I, uh, I’m waitin’ for a streetcar.”



We hear the sound of a ship. Cut to an ocean liner pulling up on the lawn of Fort Knox.



“But, in a spot like this, a boat will do,” Bugs says happily.



The cartoon ends with the boat ploughing across the lawn into the distance, as Carl Stalling plays the Warner-owned “The Song of the Marines” by Warren and Dubin (from the Warners feature The Singing Marine).



Me-as-kid didn’t like Deus Ex Machina stuff like this. “I could have thought of that,” likely said I. Foster was just trying to be off-kilter, but the ending seems more convenient than surreal.

Virgil Ross, Art Davis, Manny Perez and Ken Champin get the animation credits in 14 Carrot Rabbit, released in February 1952.