Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Merrie Melodies)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Ala Bahma, a bald stage magician, is nailing posters for his show to every surface, including the tree Bugs Bunny lives in. Bugs objects; the magician apologises, offers him a blackberry pie, and smashes it in his face. Bugs promises revenge. At the show, he turns up inside the magician's hat, replaces himself with a carrot, repeats the hat trick better than its owner and hits Ala Bahma with his own mallet, until the magician boards up his hat with planks and nails. Bugs volunteers for the Indian basket trick, pretends to be stabbed, slips out behind the magician's back, and when caught plays a round of statues with him before the finale, in which the pie comes back to its rightful target and Bugs takes the applause.
Why It Matters
- It is the earliest of Chuck Jones's great Bugs Bunny cartoons: the rabbit is calmer and more deliberate than in Clampett's films, the magician is a perfectly sustained straight man, and the pie's return at the end is the kind of symmetrical payoff Jones built his later films on. Bugs never says "What's up, Doc?", which makes it a rarity.
- The film is in the public domain through non-renewal, and it has been shown constantly as a result; it was also one of the first Bugs cartoons to be reissued in restored form on DVD. Jones's development from the slow, cute cartoons of 1939-41 to the sharp comedy of 1942 can be dated almost exactly to this film and The Dover Boys, released three months earlier.
Notes and Trivia
- Bugs's exit through the stage curtain, playing to the audience, was reused as a model for his later theatrical bows.
- Tedd Pierce, who wrote it, also wrote Wackiki Wabbit and Yankee Doodle Daffy the following year.
- See also: The Dover Boys (1942), Wackiki Wabbit (1943), Fresh Hare (1942).
