What About Thad?

It’s fitting that the curtain on Paramount’s fifty-plus year association with animated shorts was brought down by Ralph Bakshi, who would usher in a wave of animated works the old-timers he apprenticed under never dreamed of. More fitting that it escalates the studio’s timeless (?) association with cat-and-mouse cartoons to astronomic proportions, serving as a commentary on the shifting political climates in the late 1960s. A bumpkin who enjoys being a tyrant is taken to a foreign land where he is pitted against a scourge beyond his control. He is given accolades for his failures. He finally seals his own doom with a nuclear quasi-holocaust. Is it any wonder this made during Nam?

The very bizarre Hare Ribbin’ was one of the very first cartoons I posted a complete animator breakdown for (thanks to Mike Kazaleh), but it’s been a few years, so I’m rerunning it here.

3/16 – Yes, I know DailyMotion purged the video. I will put it up online again later this week when I have a steadier connection.

(Yes, I know I misspelled Will Hays’s name in the video, but I don’t think he or Joseph Breen are entitled to the honor (or respect) of having their names spelled correctly anyway.)

There are numerous changes between the released version and the ‘director’s cut’ that emerged in Mark Kausler’s collection (and others). I edited them in to the video for your enjoyment (not very well admittedly, as I haven’t gotten the hang of iMovie). The most notorious is the gun-down-the-throat ending being replaced with the dog being duped into committing suicide. (“Dog can’t be shot by rabbit, but dog can shoot self.” - J. Breen to L. Schlesinger, Jan. 1944). As to why the other pieces of animation were cut, we can only guess. Certainly not because of running time, as other shorts from the same season ran around 8.5 minutes. Perhaps the extended game of ‘tag’ between Bugs and the dog was considered “too gay”, even by Bugs-in-drag standards.

Excessive reuse from earlier Bugs cartoons is in the first half of this cartoon, to the point where it gets sloppy at times (Bugs’s hopping underwater, the omitted scene of the dog panting), though The Heckling Hare footage is at least facelifted well in Manny Gould’s drawing style. All of which is to say, you can’t say enough about the perfection of the original animation in this cartoon. (Jack Bradbury’s footage is the exception.)

Manny Gould is a mystery to me. He spent years at the helm on Columbia’s Krazy Kat, one of the worst theatrical series of all time, and yet his footage in the Clampett shorts rivals that of McKimson and Scribner. I pity that we don’t have any on-record insight from Gould, as he died literally the day (or two) before historian Milt Gray was supposed to interview him.

I often see this short scorned and I’ve never understood why. Personally, I think it’s one of the funniest of all the Bugs cartoons (and probably my favorite of Clampett’s). People say Clampett’s Bugs is an “arrogant bully”, but how? Buckaroo Bugs is taxing, true, but far more for the sloppy cycling of footage and the fact that Red Hot Ryder is not funny. But everything Bugs does in Hare Ribbin’ is in response to a dog that’s trying to bite his legs off – how is this “off the rails”? It’s certainly more sophomoric than any other Bugs cartoon ever made with the off-color body odor and sniffing of privates jokes, but if the jokes are funny, why should they be a mark against it?

I will guarantee though that if you see this short with an audience, you’ll always hear, “why are they still underwater?” Perhaps that’s where the hate comes from – Clampett challenges even cartoon physics.

I don’t think anyone will disagree with the statement that Daffy Duck is the least formulaic character in cartoon history. Unless you count the Jones ‘Rabbit/Duck’ trio (I don’t), all of the character’s cartoons are different. There may be reused gags or concepts once in awhile, but all of the directors seemed to find it easiest to come up with new, un-rehashed cartoons for the duck.

Freleng’s His Bitter Half is of the the handful of cynical shorts that shows Daffy as a married man. For my money, it’s probably the funniest, neck-and-neck with Tashlin’s also excellent Stupid Cupid. (Daffy was also married in Clampett’s Wise Quacks and Henpecked Duck, Davis’s Quackodile Tears, and Freleng’s Stork Naked, in which Daffy basically tries to perform the first animated abortion.)

This is one of the best cartoons written by Tedd Pierce, the ‘weak sister’ of the Termite Terrace writing trio. I’ve written before that I find his period with Freleng (1946-49) to be particularly unexceptional, but this and his other classic Daffy (Golden Yeggs) are probably Freleng’s two best with the character.

There’s some really funny timing solutions in this cartoon, like the one below with Daffy getting punched in the face (Gerry Chiniquy), or Daffy’s take not even fully registering before the explosion (Virgil Ross). These sort of things are what separated the Warner guys from the rest.

I ID’ed the animators of this short in hopes of further educating the Internet on proper animation ID’ing.

(I faked the Merrie Melodies logo too, so the copyright and production number notices are incorrect. I could have corrected them if I had more time…)