The less said about “Bugs Bunny’s Bustin’ Out All Over,” the better. This CBS-aired special was another Chuck Jones mess, with two of the worst Bugs Bunny shorts ever conceived plus a Road Runner romp that was strictly okay.
The first short, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny,” travels over the terrain that was better explored in Bob Clampett’s 1944 “The Old Grey Hare,” with younger versions of Bugs and Elmer Fudd in a frenetic chase. But whereas Clampett’s classic had the characters as wild infants engaged in fast-paced slapstick and bold visualizations, Jones reimagined them at the elementary school level with lethargic sight gags and weak animation.
And while Jones’ later works were burdened with verbosity, this cartoon ratchets up the endless babbling to an obnoxious level. Seriously, what’s with the nonstop talking in these late-career Jones cartoons?
The other Bugs short, “Spaced Out Bunny,” brings back Marvin the Martian for an interplanetary kidnapping that takes Bugs back into outer space. Hugo the Abominable Snowman is also present, but he can’t save this from being a wholly laugh-free endeavor.
Things improve somewhat with “Soup and Sonic,” with Wile E. Coyote still trying to catch the Road Runner and, amazingly, succeeding in a bizarre sight gag. It is nowhere as funny as the Golden Age Road Runner shorts, but at least the damn thing has some life to it – which cannot be said for the other two shorts.