False Hare (1964)
Directed by Robert McKimson
Story by John Dunn
Animation by Warren Batchelder, George Grandpré, Ted Bonnicksen
Music by Bill Lava
B.B. Wolf and his giggly nephew conspire to trap Bugs Bunny by creating Club Del Conejo, a phony social club designed exclusively for rabbits. Bugs, of course, is wise to the antics of these lupine predators but plays along, inevitably causes B.B. to fall victims to his extravagant booby-traps.
Notable as the final Bugs Bunny cartoon of the Golden Age and the final cartoon completed before the original Warner Bros. Animation studio closed in 1963, “False Hare” is a dull, cheap-looking mess that fails at every level.
B.B. Wolf and his nephew (who refers to the elder villain as “Uncle Big Bad”) were dismal creations last seen in the 1958 mediocrity “Now, Hare This,” and it is baffling that director Robert McKimson and writer John Dunn would dig them up again for a series of tiresome and predictable slapstick gags. Even more bizarre is having Foghorn Leghorn in a gag appearance at the cartoon’s denouement, as the gregarious rooster never had any connection to the Bugs Bunny adventures.
Mercifully, Bugs Bunny was not among the characters included in a new series of cartoons created when Warner Bros. restarted its animated shorts output in 1964. Those post-Golden Age cartoons – which featured the disastrous pairing of Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales plus a revival of the Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote antics – gave new meaning to the word “atrocious.”
For the rest of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Bugs would be confined to television, where repeated broadcasts of the Golden Age classics ensured his superstardom to new generations of cartoon lovers.