Show Biz Bugs (1957)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Animation by Gerry Chiniquy, Arthur Davis, Virgil Ross
Music by Milt Franklyn
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are performers in a vaudeville revue, but Daffy is furious that Bugs has top billing and a star’s dressing room plus the audience’s frenzied adulation while he faces the indignity of being assigned the men’s bathroom as his dressing room and an audience that greets his performing with either stony silence or a tomato thrown at his face. Unable to upstage and sabotage Bugs, Daffy pulls out all stops to perform a wildly dangerous act where he consumes multiple explosive ingredients and blows himself up. The audience loves the act and wants more, but alas it is too late – Daffy’s soul is Heaven bound when he ruefully confides to Bugs that he can only do that explosive act once.
This Bugs-Daffy Duck frenemy entry is a tremendously funny cartoon, but it is also an odd work because Bugs doesn’t have a single funny line in the film. Indeed, Bugs is almost a blank slate of a personality while Daffy has too much negative personality, going so far as to repeatedly insult Bugs with surprisingly harsh taunts.
“Show Biz Bugs” is also curious because some of the most memorable gags are recycled from earlier cartoons, which at this point was starting to become a habit for the Friz Freleng-directed cartoons. In this case, Daffy’s disastrous act with supposedly trained pigeons and his show-stopping number were used in the 1949 “Curtain Razor” while the booby-trapped xylophone was previously seen as a dynamite-rigged piano in the 1951 “Ballot Box Bunny.”
And still, it works. It is astonishing to watch Daffy’s violent ego grows more corybantic while Bugs’ laid-back demeanor betrays no acknowledgment of the sputtering duck’s contempt – this is funnier than having Bugs goading Daffy because the latter’s self-destructiveness is entirely of his making. Even better, the recycled gags are funnier here than in their original presentations – Daffy’s over-the-top reactions makes these scenes work brilliantly, a tribute to Mel Blanc’s incredible voice performances and the animators’ talent in capturing multiple degrees of the character’s humiliation.
There is also the sublime segment with Bugs and Daffy doing a dance routine to “Tea for Two.” This is one of the all-time best musical numbers in a Warner Bros. cartoon, bringing a touch of high style to the low comedy knockabout.
“Show Biz Bugs” was the last Bugs-Daffy frenemy film that is truly a laugh out loud classic. The characters would appear together in other cartoons, but they never duplicated the inventiveness found here.