Lighter Than Hare (1960)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Friz Freleng
Animation by Gerry Chiniquy, Arthur Davis, Virgil Ross
Music by Milt Franklyn
From a human resources perspective, one must admire Yosemite Sam’s occupational versatility. Originally conceived as a desperado, he later worked as a pirate ship captain, a prison guard, a Hessian mercenary, a sheik, a medieval knight, and in “Lighter Than Hare” he is an extraterrestrial invader. Nice work if you can get it, eh?
In “Lighter Than Hare,” an alien invasion craft captained by “Yosemite Sam of Outer Space” lands outside of a City Dump where Bugs Bunny is living. Bugs taps into the scrap materials around him for a series of inventions that come in handy when Sam’s robot soldiers try to apprehend the wily Earth creature.
Typical of these late-stage Bugs Bunny cartoons, the carrot-chomping hero too easily dispatches his enemies. Director Friz Freleng did double-duty as screenwriter, and to his credit he came up with some genuinely funny gags, including Bugs mistaking an alien robot for a trash can – the degraded metallic being coughs up garbage – and Bugs using his ears as helicopter blades to take him skyward. There is also a funny reference to the radio show version of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” that was still being broadcast in 1960, long after radio mostly ceased to be a national entertainment medium.
A special shout-out goes to Milt Franklyn, whose original score mixes typical cartoon music with the theremin-style accompaniment one associates with science-fiction of that era. Franklyn was mostly overshadowed by his predecessor Carl Stalling as the music master of the Warner Bros. cartoons, but in “Lighter Than Hare” he creates one of his most original and invigorating compositions.
