Southern Fried Rabbit (1953)
Directed by I. Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Animation by Ken Champin, Arthur Davis, Manuel Perez, Virgil Ross
Music by Carl W. Stalling
“Southern Fried Rabbit” might have the most preposterous plot of any Bugs Bunny cartoon. When Bugs’ carrot field in an unnamed Northern state is withered into nothingness by a drought, he finds a newspaper declaring Alabama is enjoying a record carrot crop harvest. Bugs walks to the South, but is stopped at the Mason-Dixon line by Confederate soldier Yosemite Sam, who declares that he’s under orders from General Robert E. Lee to repel Yankees from setting foot on Southern soil. Bugs notes that the War Between the States ended some 90 years earlier, but Sam angrily responds “I ain’t no clock watcher” and tries to keep Bugs out of Dixie.
From that starting point, “Southern Fried Rabbit” is a hit-and-miss affair. The hits involve Bugs as “General Brickwall Jackson” ordering Sam into a marching exercise that lands the pint-sized aggressor into a well, and later Bugs rips some pages out of Margaret Mitchell’s epic as “Scarlett,” the petticoated resident of a plantation with a cannon in the closet – of course, it fires on Sam, who was already blown up by Bugs in an earlier sequence involving a failed bomb attack. There is also a clever closing gag involving Sam and another set of Yankees – if you haven’t seen the cartoon, I won’t give away the joke.
On the downside, Bugs tries to evade Sam by masquerading as a banjo-strumming Black slave. Bugs’ Stepin Fetchit-style antics are disrupted when he starts singing “Yankee Doodle,” which aggravates Sam. Bugs then puts a whip in Sam’s hand and pleads to “massa” not to be punished – he abruptly exits and returns dressed as Abraham Lincoln, who hands Sam a business card and tells him to “look me up at my Gettysburg address.” The slave joke was edited out of television broadcasts for decades – it shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and it was actually recycled from the 1949 “Wise Quackers” when Daffy Duck pretended to be an antebellum-era slave and Lincoln while a befuddled Elmer Fudd was victim to this double fraud.