Every Bugs Bunny Ever: Rebel Rabbit (1949)

Rebel Rabbit (1949)
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Animation by Ben Washam
Music by Carl W. Stalling

This is probably the most unhinged I’ve ever seen Bugs Bunny and probably the closest that he’s ever come to transforming in to a super villain of a sorts.

Like previous exploits Bugs Bunny tends to be a victim of his own ego, which is something that’s often overlooked in future shorts. In “Rebel Rabbit,” he’s not so much battling a predator as he is, well, having a virtual mental breakdown on screen. Sadly none of it is really all that funny. Save for some sharp animation, “Rebel Rabbit” has no structure or much of a three act narrative to begin with. It’s basically just a string of skits with Bugs Bunny wreaking untold havoc on various states and ecolosystems all for the simple fact that he’s not deemed too worthy by the US Government.

While waking in the woods one day, Bugs happens across a series of posters promoting the bounties for various animals. Bugs notices high bounties on various animals with $50 on foxes, $75 on bears, but he is absolutely flabbergasted when notices that it’s only a two-cent bounty on rabbits. Angered and outraged, he mails himself to Washington and confronts the gaming commissioner who reasons that since Bunnies are harmless and kind, they can’t do damage, and aren’t deemed a threat. For some inexplicable reason, Bugs finds this whole concept offensive and decides he’s going to commit pure chaos so people can know that “Bugs Bunny Was Here!”

It’s all so wholly inconsistent especially considering Bugs spends a lot of his time in various shorts preaching to us about being good Americans, patriotic Americans, and finding ways to help “the cause” as well as America from our homes. And then one day he wakes up and decides he’s going to stick it to the man for such a petty reason? I just don’t buy this motivation. If anything though “Rebel Rabbit” is significant in that it is the source of the now famous internet meme of Bugs cutting Florida off of America and letting it drift off. It’s now being used ad nauseum in online political debates all over the world for–people that think that they’re being clever.

All things considered while some gags are a bit stale, they’re also effective thanks to the animation and great voice work. Among the chaos Bugs dealts, he attacks a guard with his own billy club, he pulls stunts like renaming Barney Baruch’s private bench as “Bugs Bunny’s;” he paints barbershop pole stripes on the Washington Monument, rewires the lights in Times Square to read “Bugs Bunny Wuz Here,” he shuts down Niagara Falls like a faucet, he sells the entire island of Manhattan back to Native Americans (“Dey wouldn’t take it til I trew in a set of dishes!”), he saws Florida off from the rest of the country, swipes all the locks off the Panama Canal, fills in the entirety of the Grand Canyon, and then literally ties up railroad tracks.

By this point the short removes all illusion of a plot or narrative structure now relying on a ton of outlandish gags, especially one Bugs goes from a 2 cent animal bounty, to public enemy number one. He’s then attacked by American armed forces cut to a final scene of Bugs in jail asking “Could it be that I took this thing too far?” He took it far, and inexplicably all the way to a deep end for short that likely would have worked so much better with Daffy Duck in the lead. Daffy always had that unearned sense of accomplishment and elitism, so his ego being bruised causing him to go off the deep end would have worked so much more.

As for “Rebel Rabbit” it’s a mixed bag that I’m not a big fan of as Bugs does stuff in this short just to… do… stuff. What a maroon.

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