His Hare-Raising Tale (1951)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Animation by Virgil Ross
Music by Carl Stalling
One of the relatively few Warner Bros. cartoons that mainly consisted of recycled footage from older shorts, “His Hare-Raising Tale” is an amusing endeavor that pointed to a potential scenario shift that, sadly, was never explored in depth.
The film presents Bugs Bunny sharing his photo album with his impressionable nephew – the latter is not named in this film, but was later identified as Clyde in a follow-up film. Bugs shows old photographs of himself and recounts his alleged past adventures as captured in those snapshots – we are treated to servings of older footage with Bugs as a baseball athlete in “Baseball Bugs” (1946), as a vaudeville headliner in “Stage Door Cartoon” (1944) opposite Elmer Fudd, as a boxer in “Rabbit Punch” (1948), as a test pilot in a sabotaged airplane in “Falling Hare” (1943), and as an astronaut stranded on the moon in “Haredevil Hare” (1948). By the time he recalls his final adventure, his nephew is visibly hostile to what he views as Bugs’ wild lies. For the benefit of those who never saw “His Hare-Raising Tale,” I will not be share the denouement gag involved in Bugs’ attempt to vouch for his honesty – while Friz Freleng is the director of this short, the gag in question is closer in spirit to the zany surrealism of Tex Avery or Frank Tashlin. (Although, in fairness, Freleng did a great job reshaping the older footage into this presentation.)
While the relation between Bugs and his nephew does not occupy the bulk of the film, what we see of it is beautifully textured. Bugs is angry when the youngster laughs at an old photo of him, but he perks up considerably when Bugs details his alleged larger than life adventures to a wonderful-filled audience of one little bunny. The climactic disbelief by the nephew of his uncle’s story is highly effective – Bugs is clearly jolted by the assault on his honesty, and for the few precious seconds where he tries to regain the angry lad’s adoration he displays a vulnerability that almost never popped up in these cartoons. And the final hilarious line in the film – perfectly delivered by Mel Blanc – gives Bugs a distinctive mix of irritability and self-pity that was not visible before or after.
The uncle-nephew relation only continued with the 1954 “Yankee Doodle Bugs,” with the nephew character abruptly disappearing from the Golden Age films. This was one of the Termite Terrace mistakes – the dynamic between the older, cocky Bugs and his wide-eyed admiring nephew was both warm and funny, and it was far more invigorating than the often-tiresome father-son bickering of the bumbling Sylvester and his annoying offspring Sylvester Jr. that polluted too many of the late 1950s shorts. But, hey, isn’t hindsight a triumph of much-too-late 20-20 clarity?