BOOTLEG FILES 909: “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!” (1969 animated short).
LAST SEEN: On DailyMotion.com and several other sites.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: A one-shot outing that came at the end of Warner Bros.’ animated theatrical run.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Maybe in a Warner Bros. anthology collection.
The last iteration of this column featured “Rabbit Habit,” an underground parody film that imagined a drug-hazed post-script for the Warner Bros. animated characters. In retrospect, “Rabbit Habit” would have been a better sign-off than “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!”, a 1969 short that was completed just before the celebrated animation studio finally ended its theatrical output.
The original Warner Bros. animation studio closed in 1963, but in the following year DePatie-Freleng Enterprises was contracted to continue creating animated shorts under the Warner Bros. banner. These cartoons were, for the most part, atrocious – tiresome pairings of Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales plus dull entries in the Road Runner series. The animation production was brought back in-house in 1967, at which time the studio was called Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The revived studio attempted to start a more mature vibe with experimental works including “Norman Normal” (1968) and “The Door” (1968) – the latter was independently produced and acquired by the studio for release under its banner. It also sought to invent new characters to inhabit its cartoons. This was a great idea that should have breathed new life into the creativity process. Unfortunately, the characters that were brought forth – including Cool Cat, Bunny and Claude, Lonzo and his blue-tailed monkey, and Merlin the Magic Mouse and Second Banana – were one-dimensional concepts stuck in predictable slapstick situations.
The last new characters created under the Warner Bros. brand were the Quick Brown Fox and Rapid Rabbit, which duplicated the protocol of the Road Runner series. Quick Brown Fox (who was actually red in color) was the gangly predator who used elaborate strategies to catch his prey dinner, while Rapid Rabbit (who was brown) was the speedy protagonist who constantly eluded his hunter. Neither character spoke, although Rapid Rabbit used a Harpo Marx-style bicycle horn to honk out his presence in a manner similar to the Road Runner’s “Beep! Beep!”
In “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!”, Quick Brown Fox is reading a cookbook recipe for rabbit stew that tells the aspiring gourmet to catch a rabbit. The fox follows in Wile E. Coyote’s sorry footsteps with booby traps that backfire on him, cannons that shoot him, a boulder dropped from a cliff that bounces off a tree and boomerangs back on him, and a Rube Goldberg-style contraption whose complex mechanism results in the fox being pummeled. All of this is very predictable and presented in a rushed manner that is nowhere near as stylish as the classic Road Runner titles.
In fairness, there are two brief moments where this cartoon is genuinely funny. The first has Quick Brown Fox stuck on the dashboard of a car that drove into him – the car pulls into a gas station where the attendant unscrews the fox’s nose and sticks a nozzle into his skull, filling him with fuel. The second is the last gag in the film where the battered fox is wrapped in a tablecloth by Rapid Rabbit, who then attaches a balloon to the tablecloth which carries his adversary away into the sky.
The characters were originally conceived by Alex Lovy, who was the head of the studio at the time. Lovy’s version had Quick Brown Fox as a brown-furred being while his long-eared obsession was a grey-furred smart-aleck called Jack Rabbit. It is unclear why the characters underwent hue changes.
Lovy left Warner Bros. while the cartoon was in preparation and Robert McKimson filled in as the director. It played in theaters beginning in June 1969, but no further cartoons with the characters were planned. Four months after “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!” premiered, the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts animation studio shut down.
“Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!” has never been made available in any commercial home entertainment format, although it has been included in Warner Bros. animations programming on television and streaming. The cartoon can also be found online in unauthorized online postings. For animation fans and Warner Bros. completists, its appeal is strictly as a historic curio.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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