Hare-Way to the Stars (1958)
Directed by Chuck Jones
Story by Michael Maltese
Animation by Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Harry Love
Music by Milt Franklyn
A half-asleep Bugs Bunny, hungover from mixing carrot juice and radish juice the night before, climbs up the ladder of his underground residence to take his morning bath in a nearby pond, unaware that a space agency parked a rocket ship directly above his hole in the ground. Bugs keeps climbing from the hole into the rocket, which blasts off from the Earth. Bugs only realizes his predicament when he unscrews the rocket’s cap and gets knocked off by a speeding satellite that lands him the lair of Marvin the Martian, who is planning to blow up the Earth with his “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” because it obscures his view of Venus. Bugs steals the “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” and Marvin dispatches a squad of Martians to capture him.
Marvin the Martian had been absent from the Warner Bros. cartoons since the 1953 classic Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century,” and here he is more of a passive observer to Bugs’ mayhem rather than an active antagonist. In this go-round, Marvin gets laughs from his silly voice reciting wonderful nonsense lines such as “Where’s the kaboom? There’s supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!” and “That creature has stolen the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator!” By the end of the cartoon, a beleaguered Marvin gets blown up by his own weapon and wearily sighs, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”
The actual slapstick chasing of Bugs was outsourced to the large green bird-like Martians that were last seen in the 1955 Porky-Sylvester teaming “Jumpin’ Jupiter.” These creatures are “Instant Martians” grown out of tiny objects retrieved from a gumball-style machine that rise into full-size after Marvin adds a drop of water to them.
The real beauty in “Hare-Way to the Stars” is the deeply imaginative concept of Marvin’s headquarters. Rather than create a brick-and-mortar structure on the Martian surface, the animators created a wildly abstract floating headquarters with red zigzagging walkways with glass panels as walls. It is a bold and striking vision of an outer space setting – it looks as if it is floating in the galaxy rather than being moored to a planet – and it is a credit to director Chuck Jones and his animation team to invent something so visually remarkable.