Baton Bunny (1959)
Directed by Chuck Jones and Abe Levitow
Story by Michael Maltese
Animation by Ken Harris, Richard Thompson, Ben Washam
Music by Milt Franklyn
Okay, raise your hand if your first introduction to classical music came while watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. Fine, you can put your hand down now. That kind of impact is something special when you consider that only six of the Bugs Bunny cartoons incorporated symphonic compositions or operas into their stories: “A Corny Concerto” (1943), “Rhapsody Rabbit” (1946), “Long-Haired Hare” (1949), “Rabbit of Seville” (1950), “What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957), and today’s offering “Baton Bunny” (1959).
“Baton Bunny” presents Bugs as the guest conductor for The Warner Bros. Symphony Orchestra’s performance of “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna” by Franz von Suppé. This is mostly a single character film, except for an intrusive fly and an off-screen audience member who begins to disrupt the performance with loud coughing. Bugs holds up a sign reading “Throw the Bum Out,” and an off-camera scuffle and physical expulsion is heard. This is a mild retread of a similar gag in “Rhapsody Rabbit” when pianist Bugs becomes annoyed with a coughing audience member – except in that film he pulls out a gun and fatally shoots the disturbing character.
After a bit of Victor Borge-style fumbling with reading glasses and sheet music, Bugs sharpens his conducting rod as if it were a pool cue and then launches into an athletically melodramatic conducting style that could be seen as a parody of Leonard Bernstein’s vigorous orchestra gyrations.
On the plus side, screenwriter Michael Maltese invents some clever tomfoolery that is perfectly synced to Milt Franklyn’s adaptation of the von Suppé music, especially an out-of-nowhere pantomime of a cowboys and Indians duel with Bugs folding his ears to resemble the headwear of the rival combatants who use instruments as their weapons.
But “Baton Bunny” has a few problems that keeps it from achieving the genius of the earlier classical music romps. For starters, the characterization of Bugs is seriously off – he is first shown as a bumbler who can’t keep control of his formalwear, and then becomes so infuriated with a pesky fly that he violently loses his temper in trying to swat it. That kind of behavior would be more appropriate for Daffy Duck, which would have made this work much funnier.
It also doesn’t help that some of “Baton Bunny” bears more than a slight resemblance to the 1935 Disney short “The Band Concert,” where conductor Mickey has near-identical mishaps including being knocked off his podium by the force of the music, struggling with ill-fitting clothing, and dealing with an intrusive insect (a bee for Mickey, rather than a fly). This is not to claim that Maltese and directors Chuck Jones and Abe Levitow intentionally “borrowed” from Disney, but it is a coincidence of epic proportions that their film’s gags are so close to the Disney humor.
However, the film has its fans, as witnessed at this concert engagement with a live orchestra performing the score: