Thursday, May 25, 2006

When Cartoons Evolved 3 - First Bugs Bunnies


Here's the first Bugs Bunny cartoon - made by "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton in 1938.Here he is in a typical calm Bugs Bunny pose.
Here he is laughing the Woody Woodpecker laugh 2 years before Woody was created.

..still doing magic.

This cartoon is basically a remake of Porky's Duck Hunt with some proto Bugs traits just starting to emerge. He's kinda like Daffy Duck-really wacky but with some underplayed scenes that predict Bugs' future.

Here's Chuck Jones using the early proto Bugs in a cartoon from 1938 Presto Changeo
He's not the star of the cartoon and is basically a magician's rabbit.


Here's another Hardaway and Dalton Bugs Bunny cartoon: Hare-um Scare-um - 1939.
His design is starting to look like the Bugs we all know. His voice is sort of like the retarded early Barney Rubble.
A typical Bugs Bunny routine.
Here he is invoking mock sympathy - making fun of pathos. A very Warner Bros. type of irreverence-very anti-Disney.



To remind you of an important point I made last post: In the old days, artists evolved their ideas constantly. The character designs would change from cartoon to cartoon, director to director and in some cartoons, from scene to scene!

These 3 cartoons here represent 18 minutes of Bugs Bunny's development-that's less than a half hour cartoon. Today's cartoons are frozen in time. They barely change at all over 100s of half hours. The world is opposed to creativity today.

70 years ago, creativity and rapid progress were just taken for granted.

You have to be raised in an uncreative environment in order to blindly accept how bland everything is today.

The difference between a generation that grew up in the 1930s and a generation that has grown up in the 70s or later is stark.

When my parents first saw some modern prime-time cartoons they said instantly: "I can draw better than that." That should be the obvious conclusion.

Here, Evan has provided proof that modern cartoons evolve:


Year 1




10 years later.