The Fair-Haired Hare (1951)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Animation by Ken Champin, Virgil Ross, Arthur Davis, Manuel Perez, John Carey
Music by Carl Stalling
When Yosemite Sam builds a cabin on top of Bugs Bunny’s hole-in-the-ground domicile, Bugs vows to sue Sam for damages. A judge rules that Bugs and Sam must share the newly constructed residence, with the knowledge that full ownership goes to the survivor if one of them should pass away. Sam opts to speed Bugs’ demise, but his homicidal schemes inevitably backfire. Furious at being outsmarted, he opts to fill Bugs’ subterranean home with explosives, but Bugs redirects the devices to the crawl space between the cabin’s floor and the bare ground. Sam winds up blowing his home into the clouds while declaring, “Well, whaddya know, I’ve got a cabin in the sky!”
“The Fair-Haired Hare” has a lot of inventive sight gags, most notably when Bugs emerges from his hole into the cabin and gets stuck in the mouth of a bearskin rug, and later when he plans to take his lawsuit to the “highest court in the land” – in this case, a courthouse high atop a mountain where the road tells us that justice is found at an elevation of 6,723 feet. Also, the sight of rough-and-tumble Sam in a frilly apron while making Bugs breakfast is unexpected and delightful.
However, “The Fair-Haired Hare” feels like it is trapped within the confines of a one-reel cartoon. The premise of the short is so strong that it is easy to imagine what other sorts of mayhem could have been created in Sam’s eagerness to get rid of Bugs. It is a shame that Warner Bros. didn’t allow its cartoon to expand into a second reel – this effort deserved more running time.