Bugs Bunny

Moments when Bugs loses the upper hand are very rare, and his opponents are almost always morons who pose no serious threat

This time around, Bugs and Daffy are sitcom characters living in the suburbs

Just a bit of frivolity after a weekend where most of the news was anything but frivolous: someone compiled a collection of scenes where Bugs Bunny dresses in drag.

I think it’s Chuck Jones’s “Broom-Stick Bunny.” I think I have a real fondness for Halloween stories where trick-or-treating turns disastrous, whether it’s for Bugs in this cartoon or Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me In St. Louis (one of the few movies that portrays kids playing old-fashioned Halloween games, where they literally try to be evil). It is kind of a spooky concept.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beeevvndN2c

The “Witch Hazel” character had already appeared in an even funnier cartoon, “Bewitched Bunny,” where she was voiced by Bea Benaderet. By the time they made this follow-up, Benaderet had quit doing voices for WB (she did most of the female characters in the ’40s and early ’50s), so in “Broom-Stick Bunny” she was replaced by June Foray, who did a great job. (Foray was never able to match Benaderet’s work as Granny in the Tweety cartoons, though.)

But Foray had already used a similar voice for another character called “Witch Hazel,” in the Disney Halloween cartoon “Trick Or Treat.” Jones told Foray that Disney couldn’t sue because Witch Hazel is an actual product, so nobody owned the name. Anyway, here’s another Halloween cartoon adventure, Donald Duck and Witch Hazel in “Trick Or Treat.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skdVouumMk4

Also, via the excellent Chuck Jones blog, here are some layout drawings Jones made for the end of “Broom-Stick Bunny” (they were for the animators, as a guide to how the scene should look; at his best, Jones’s layout drawings were some of the most expressive in the business. That’s why his best cartoons had such terrific, memorable character poses and expressions):

Can’t find what I was originally going to post for Halloween, so the fallback position is, as always, some Bugs Bunny cartoons (which count as TV ’cause that’s where we all saw them for the first time). And the ultimate Halloween antagonist for Bugs is Witch Hazel, a green, cackling, bobby-pin-shedding witch created by Chuck Jones in 1954’s “Bewitched Bunny,” where she was voiced by Bea Benaderet (Betty Rubble).

Since nobody can think of anything except elections (even those of us in ridings, districts or states where the winner is already known and our vote doesn’t count), I feel I should highlight some election-related clips. And obviously, the place to start is with the cartoon that introduced us all to the violent, backstabbing and sometimes literally suicidal nature of political campaigning.