{"id":45534,"date":"2024-11-20T07:28:54","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T12:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=45534"},"modified":"2024-11-20T07:30:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T12:30:53","slug":"every-bugs-bunny-ever-his-hare-raising-tale-1951","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/20\/every-bugs-bunny-ever-his-hare-raising-tale-1951\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Bugs Bunny Ever: His Hare-Raising Tale (1951)"},"content":{"rendered":"

His Hare-Raising Tale <\/strong>(1951)
\nDirected by\tFriz Freleng
\nStory by\tWarren Foster
\nAnimation by\tVirgil Ross
\nMusic by\tCarl Stalling<\/p>\n

One of the relatively few Warner Bros. cartoons that mainly consisted of recycled footage from older shorts, \u201cHis Hare-Raising Tale\u201d is an amusing endeavor that pointed to a potential scenario shift that, sadly, was never explored in depth.
\n<\/p>\n

The film presents Bugs Bunny sharing his photo album with his impressionable nephew \u2013 the latter is not named in this film, but was later identified as Clyde in a follow-up film. Bugs shows old photographs of himself and recounts his alleged past adventures as captured in those snapshots \u2013 we are treated to servings of older footage with Bugs as a baseball athlete in \u201cBaseball Bugs\u201d (1946), as a vaudeville headliner in \u201cStage Door Cartoon\u201d (1944) opposite Elmer Fudd, as a boxer in \u201cRabbit Punch\u201d (1948), as a test pilot in a sabotaged airplane in \u201cFalling Hare\u201d (1943), and as an astronaut stranded on the moon in \u201cHaredevil Hare\u201d (1948). By the time he recalls his final adventure, his nephew is visibly hostile to what he views as Bugs\u2019 wild lies. For the benefit of those who never saw \u201cHis Hare-Raising Tale,\u201d I will not be share the denouement gag involved in Bugs\u2019 attempt to vouch for his honesty \u2013 while Friz Freleng is the director of this short, the gag in question is closer in spirit to the zany surrealism of Tex Avery or Frank Tashlin. (Although, in fairness, Freleng did a great job reshaping the older footage into this presentation.)<\/p>\n

While the relation between Bugs and his nephew does not occupy the bulk of the film, what we see of it is beautifully textured. Bugs is angry when the youngster laughs at an old photo of him, but he perks up considerably when Bugs details his alleged larger than life adventures to a wonderful-filled audience of one little bunny. The climactic disbelief by the nephew of his uncle\u2019s story is highly effective \u2013 Bugs is clearly jolted by the assault on his honesty, and for the few precious seconds where he tries to regain the angry lad\u2019s adoration he displays a vulnerability that almost never popped up in these cartoons. And the final hilarious line in the film \u2013 perfectly delivered by Mel Blanc \u2013 gives Bugs a distinctive mix of irritability and self-pity that was not visible before or after. <\/p>\n

The uncle-nephew relation only continued with the 1954 \u201cYankee Doodle Bugs,\u201d with the nephew character abruptly disappearing from the Golden Age films. This was one of the Termite Terrace mistakes \u2013 the dynamic between the older, cocky Bugs and his wide-eyed admiring nephew was both warm and funny, and it was far more invigorating than the often-tiresome father-son bickering of the bumbling Sylvester and his annoying offspring Sylvester Jr. that polluted too many of the late 1950s shorts. But, hey, isn\u2019t hindsight a triumph of much-too-late 20-20 clarity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

His Hare-Raising Tale (1951) Directed by Friz Freleng Story by Warren Foster Animation by Virgil Ross Music by Carl Stalling One of the relatively few Warner Bros. cartoons that mainly consisted of recycled footage from older shorts, \u201cHis Hare-Raising Tale\u201d is an amusing endeavor that pointed to a potential scenario shift that, sadly, was never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":45535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3068],"tags":[167,1816,3529,3490,3530,1175],"class_list":["post-45534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bugs-bunny-ever","tag-bugs-bunny","tag-cartoons","tag-clyde","tag-friz-freleng","tag-looney-tune","tag-warner-bros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45534"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45538,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45534\/revisions\/45538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}