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Mention “1940” to a movie fan and probably his eyes will glaze over as he rhapsodizes about “The Philadelphia Story,” “The Great Dictator,” “Kitty Foyle” and a lot of other memorable flicks.
On the movie screen at least, 1940 was a fantastic year.
But there’s one more Hollywood blockbuster event I can’t let 2015 pass without mentioning. It was 75 years ago that one of the most familiar faces, and voices, ever to grace a motion picture screen made his debut.
I’m talking about the great American Bugs Bunny.
In July of 1940 audiences saw Bugs in a Warner Bros. color cartoon entitled “Wild Hare.” The rest, as they say, was somewhat hysterical history.
For decades, youthful audiences would burst into wild cheering and applause when the face of that “wascally wabbit” zoomed onto the screen with the bouncy, Looney Tunes theme music.
It wasn’t just kids who loved Bugs. I recall adults in my family coming home from the movie house ready and willing to narrate the plot of the little seven-minute gem that preceded whatever oh-so-serious Hollywood epic was playing.
No more, though! If you want to see Bugs and his buddies today, you have to buy a DVD compilation or search online.
Here I’m going to speak for millions of people and try to explain why we went buggy over Bugs.
If there’s a common thread in those rabbity epics, I think, it’s this: Bugs Bunny knew how to pull victory from defeat and put overbearing authority in its place. Whether spoiling Elmer Fudd’s day of hunting, making an Army drill sergeant look foolish or brashly taking over a symphony orchestra, he was the lineal descendant of the guys who tossed the tea into Boston Harbor and told a bigwig named George where to go.
Is there any posture more iconically all-American than Bugs casually chomping on a carrot and heaping scorn on a defeated adversary (in a New York accent) with “Eh, what’s up, Doc?”
A committee of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt couldn’t have put it better.
Isn’t that the way we’d all like to be?
Yes, those cartoons were funny as anything. But they were funny in a way that touched us where we live – our vision of ourselves.
Bugs had a lot of colleagues and competition in the cartoon business. Yet, for my money (15 cents at the old Hart Theater), he was the best.
I don’t want to offend devotees of Porky Pig, Goofy or Jerry the Mouse: they all have their good points. I also don’t want to imply Warner Bros. cartoons translate perfectly into our era: they sometimes reveal a sensibility (or lack of) that, fortunately, we are leaving behind.
Still, Bugs rules.
Line up mug shots of two dozen of the most famous entertainment personalities of 1940, with Bugs in the middle, and which face would likely draw the most recognition? You could probably conduct the test in Vienna or Tokyo and get the same result.
Ask yourself: when you see a carrot, what pops into your head?
It’s not Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.”
