Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
A small Black hunter, drawn as a racist caricature, sets out to catch Bugs Bunny. Bugs tricks him into chopping down a tree, turns the hunter's own gun against him and tickles him helpless. Bugs leads him into a cave, where they meet a bear; realising the bear is in the rabbit hole, both run away in terror. The hunter chases Bugs through a series of holes, firing birdshot, and Bugs tricks him into falling off a cliff. Finally Bugs gets him into a game of craps. Bugs wins everything the hunter owns, including his clothes, and walks away wearing them, leaving the hunter naked and humiliated.
Why It Matters
- The film matters today chiefly as a record of how American animation used racial stereotypes. Its hunter is built from minstrel-show caricature, in design, voice and gags, and the dice-game ending draws on an especially demeaning stereotype. This is a reason to approach it with context, not to look away from it.
- It is one of the "Censored Eleven", the Warner Bros. cartoons that United Artists withdrew from U.S. television in 1968 because of their racial content. In 2001 AOL Time Warner pulled it from Cartoon Network's Bugs Bunny marathon. It shows Bugs, in only his tenth cartoon, already fully formed as the unbeatable trickster, in a story whose victim is chosen to be laughed at for his race.
Notes and Trivia
- Avery had left Warner Bros. before release, so his name does not appear on screen; he went to MGM.
- The title parodies the 1940 film All This, and Heaven Too.
- United Artists did not renew its copyright, and the cartoon entered the U.S. public domain in 1969, although the Bugs Bunny character remains under copyright.
- Contemporary trade reviews described the hunter in openly racist terms, a reminder of how routinely such caricature was accepted.
- See also: A Wild Hare (1940), Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943).