This is a Life? (1955)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Animation by Ted Bonnicksen, Arthur Davis
Music by Milt Franklyn
This offering is a hilarious riff on “This is Your Life,” a very 1950s popular program hosted by Ralph Edwards that surprised people with retrospectives of their life. The show was staged in front of a studio audience, and sometimes unsuspecting people would be taken from the audience and led to the stage. The concept of “This is Your Life” had already been brilliantly spoofed on “Your Show of Shows” in 1954, but screenwriter Warren Foster and director Friz Freleng opted to put their spin on the subject using the Looney Tunes characters.
For “This is a Life?”, Elmer Fudd takes on the Ralph Edwards role for a show that the off-screen announcer declares is “Brought to you by the Wishy Washy Washing Machine Company of Walla Walla, Washington.” Elmer goes into the audience and comes to a row where Bugs is sitting between Daffy Duck and Granny. Daffy assumes he’s the subject of the retrospective and is aghast when Elmer announces Bugs will be in the spotlight. Daffy loudly voices his disapproval several times, only to be silenced temporarily when Granny clubs him with her umbrella.
There is a wonderfully bizarre moment when Elmer launches the retrospective by asking Bugs to “start at the beginning” – and Bugs launches into a melodramatic declamation of the planet’s violent evolution that resulted in a tiny pool of water that was home to “two tiny amoeba, the start of life.” Bugs’ life is shown in clips from “A Hare Grows in Manhattan,” “Hare Do” (where he gets the best of Elmer) and “Buccaneer Bunny” (where he gets the best of Yosemite Sam).
While Bugs happily recalls how he one-upped Elmer and Sam, the men plant a bomb in a gift-wrapped box and offer it to Bugs as a tribute to his being the show’s guest. Bugs quickly realizes the explosive contents and gives it back to them, creating a frantic tossing among the threesome until Daffy emerges from the audience, claiming that he deserved it. Daffy walks off and there is a huge explosion, followed by a defeathered Daffy stalking back to Bugs and hissing, “You’re despicable.”
In watching “This is a Life?”, it is curious to see Elmer and Sam together – I am uncertain why the Warner Bros. animators never paired them again. (The characters would later turn up in “A Star is Bored,” but not together in the same scene.) It is also a shame that Granny went back to the Sylvester and Tweety shorts and didn’t have more input with Bugs – this short and the 1953 “Hare Trimmed” benefited from her spunky and unexpectedly violent presence. June Foray took over the voice performance of Granny with this cartoon, replacing Bea Benaderet.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of “This is a Life?” was having a theatrical short doing a parody of television programming. By 1955, television has secured itself so deeply into the American popular culture that the Warner Bros. cartoons could make fun of the stars and concepts of hit shows. This work was the first of multiple television parodies from the animation studio, most notably in two shorts that reimagined “The Honeymooners” with a cast of mice.
