“Bugs Bunny in Space” was hastily assembled to cash in on the unprecedented audience frenzy created by “Star Wars,” which premiered three months before this half-hour television special was broadcast.
The production weaved together four of the six Golden Age cartoons featuring the extraterrestrial character who would later gain the name Marvin the Martian. This included three Bugs Bunny encounters with Marvin plus the Daffy Duck classic “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.”
Also included was a clip from “His Hare-Raising Tale,” with Bugs telling his nephew Clyde about his alleged trip to the moon. The one cartoon missing from this selection was the 1948 “Haredevil Hare,” which was part of the collection of Warner Bros. cartoons sold to Associated Artists Productions in 1956.
There was no new animation created for this offering, which marked the only time that a 1970s-era Bugs Bunny special consisted solely of Golden Age footage. I assume there was a new narration recorded to link the old cartoons together, but I can’t be certain because “Bugs Bunny in Space” is not currently available for review. There are no complete copies of the production online and there was no home entertainment release.
A live action production called “Bugs Bunny in Space” was presented in 1977, but it had nothing to do with the television special of the same name. And if this advertisement for that show is any indication, it must have been a wonderfully bizarre romp: