Hare-Breadth Hurry (1963)
Directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble
Story by John Dunn
Animation by Tom Ray, Ken Harris, Richard Thompson, Bob Bransford, Harry Love
Music by Bill Lava
In this strange experiment at cartoon cross-pollination, Bugs Bunny is brought in as a replacement of the Road Runner – he explains to the confused viewer that the celebrated bird “sprained a giblet cornering a sharp curve the other day, so I’m standing in for him.”
Wile E. Coyote is still the bumbling predator, except he retains the muteness of his Road Runner encounters and is denied the wonderfully pompous voice used in his earlier encounters with Bugs. Unfortunately, Bugs fills the cartoon with a nonstop commentary delivered with cutesy grins directly to the viewer. This quickly becomes monotonous.
“Hare-Breadth Hare” falls into the pattern of the typical Road Runner cartoons, with the coyote failing grandly in his efforts to catch his prey. Much of the humor is predictable, although there is one surprise gag that is laugh-out-loud funny: the coyote is atop a cliff with a fishing pole featuring a carrot as bait, but when he lowers the bait a giant fish unexpectedly emerges and swallows most the coyote, who walks off with the fish’s jaws firmly clenched around his body from the waist up.
“Hare-Breadth Hare” is a noble attempt to try something different, but the resulting cartoon is obnoxious and dull.