Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are rival salesmen for the publishing house Rambling House. Bugs secures the prime assignment of selling books in the resort town of Pismo Beach while Daffy gets stuck with the Wyoming market of Thermopolis. Both of them somehow wind up in an Arabian cave, with Daffy encountering a hostile warrior guarding a treasure while Bugs gets hooked into reading stories to Prince Abba-Dabba, the spoiled son of the Sultan Yosemite Sam.
Unlike the previous Warner Bros. feature films that focused on Bugs, this work includes the output of different directors (Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson) rather than highlighting a single director’s work. The storytelling aspect of the narrative allows for an easier integration of Golden Age works into the story’s flow, as Bugs introduces tales that transition into older animation.
However, the film feels like a badly overextended primetime television special. Visually, the film is wildly inconsistent. Not only are there significant differences between the look of the old and new cartoons, but even the Golden Age cartoons display very obvious animation style changes from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.
Furthermore, the older films suffer from haphazard editing and badly dubbed new dialogue to make them fit into the contrived narrative. And the selection of Golden Age cartoons runs the quality gamut from genius (“One Froggy Evening” and “Ali Baba Bunny”) to awful (“Tweety and the Beanstalk” and “Aqua Duck”).
The film is notable as being the only time that Arthur Q. Bryan was credited among the voice performers, albeit posthumously – he was never cited as the voice of Elmer Fudd in any of the Golden Age cartoons. Also worth pointing out was the belated insertion of the 1962 “A Sheep in the Deep” into the story for the cable television broadcasts of the film – it was not included in the theatrical release and was dropped for later home video offerings.
Following this production, Warner Bros. focused its feature film attention on Daffy Duck with the 1983 release “Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island.” Bugs would only be used in that film via archival footage. There would be no additional feature films using the Looney Tunes characters for another five years.