“Hare-abian Nights” (1959)
Directed by Ken Harris
Story by Michael Maltese
Animation by Ken Harris and Ben Washam
Music by Milt Franklyn
Bugs Bunny is burrowing underground on his way to Perth Amboy, only to arrive in an Arabian sultan’s palace – a mistake he blames on failing to make a left turn in Des Moines. He thinks he is in a movie theater, but quickly discovers he is part of a line-up of would-be entertainers ordered to amuse the sultan. The performers work on an elevated stage with a trap door. If the sultan is not entertained, he pushes a button that drops the unlucky performers into a crocodile pit. Bugs is introduced as a “teller of tales” and quickly endeavors to stay out of the crocodile pit by recalling a few of his unlikely comic adventures.
“Hare-abian Nighst” gets off to a cute start with a pair of music acts that displease the sultan: a jazz quartet called “Timbuk Two Plus 3” who perform a rousing version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and an Arabian rocker named “El-Viz Preslii” who starts singing “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound camel” before being dropped into the crocodile pit.
When Bugs begins to tell his tales, originality evaporates as clips from three older shorts are inserted – “Bully for Bugs,” “Water, Water Every Hare,” and “Sahara Hare.” The third film features Yosemite Sam as an Arab warrior, and Bugs’ derogatory references to him immediately cues the viewer that Sam is also the sultan.
In animation circles, a work like “Hare-abian Nights” is known as a “cheater,” which is a cartoon that contains a large amount of footage from earlier cartoons. On its own terms, that is not necessarily terrible – the 1951 “His Hare-Raising Tale” deftly mixed older sequences with funny new footage featuring Bugs and his nephew Clyde. But in this film, unfortunately, the style and substance differences between the older and more vibrant classic work and the dullish new sequences with Bugs and Sam are difficult to overlook. And Sam’s inevitable descent into his crocodile pit is among the weakest and most predictable gags to be served in this series.
“Hare-abian Nights” is the only Golden Age short featuring Sam that was made by Chuck Jones’ unit, although direction was credited to animator Ken Harris. This was the first and only time Harris received such a Golden Age directing credit.
The plot of “Hare-abian Nights” would be reworked in the 1982 feature “Bugs Bunny’s 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales,” with Sam as the sultan ordering Bugs to read stories to his bratty son, a new character named Prince Abba-Dabba. As with “Hare-abian Nights,” that film was a “cheater” with memorable classic scenes linked by desultory new footage.
Oh, a word about the lobby card illustration at the top of this review. It is a very funny picture that certainly helps pique interest in “Hare-abian Nights,” but there is no such scene in the film – and it is too bad that the imagination and humor that went into the lobby card is absent from the film it is promoting.