So Easter is coming up and Warner is looking to celebrate that by releasing a small grouping of Easter themed DVD’s. One is a compilation of Bugs Bunny cartoons set to the theme of Easter! Normally I’d call this a lame repackaging in an attempt to gauge money in the spirit of the holiday, but I hate Easter and I love Bugs Bunny so nuts to you. Oddly enough this is actually a movie about Bugs Bunny. For some reason Granny is friends with the Easter Bunny. Sadly he’s very sick and can not deliver eggs to children, so Granny seeks out Bugs to fill in. Bugs can’t because he’s in the studio filming his latest movie and the ever reluctant hero as he is, decides to fill in for the real deal.
Like all of the big movies concerning the Looney Tunes, what the director does here is create a structure of a story and use that as an excuse to splice in scenes and large chunks of Bugs’ famous cartoons as a method of tying in all of the threads. So we go from a pretty bland animated version of the characters we love and jump in to the obviously edited footage of an earlier Bugs cartoon (Clips include: Knighty Knight Bugs, Hillbilly Hare, Bully for Bugs, Tweety’s Circus, Birds Anonymous, For Scent-Imental Reasons, Rabbit Of Seville, Robin Hood Daffy and Sahara Hare et al.) that’s more defined and better animated. It’s a blatant compilation serving as an illusion of a movie, and only entertains when we get glimpses at the actual cartoons that are included in the movie.
Worse yet the clips have nothing to do with Easter and are basically there to fill time while we jump to Granny who simply sits watching Bugs cheering him on while Daffy auditions to fill in for Bugs on Easter. I don’t like to feel conned, and with “Bugs Bunny’s Easter Funnies,” I was basically being conned in to sitting down for fifty minutes to watch a glorified montage. And the sad thing is that the story never gets to the point. It’s forty minutes of talking about the Easter Bunny until the very last moment where we see Daffy in costume. If I want to celebrate the Looney Tunes, I’ll revisit my chest of VHS tapes. As for this, I’ll just go in to my treasury of Looney Tunes classics and laugh my butt off.
In the range of DVD Extras we get an interactive puzzle for the kids that’s so easy it’s insulting, a seven minute courtesy toon “His Hare Raising Tale” that’s a compilation in and of itself, and… trailers! Boo! If I want to watch Looney Tunes goodness I’ll go seek them out, not watch a “movie” that purports to tell a story but just meshes together clips of past episodes trying to pass it off as an honest to goodness story. And the extras just aren’t worth looking at either.