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Years later till now. Brings back feels ya know? If you have a discord you can add me. Leader#6816

Sometimes I think of cheese

Bugs Bunny, the linchpin of the Looney Tunes, has been called everything from "classic" to "perennial" to "an American institution" to "one of our national heroes"--and "wascally wabbit," "long-eared galoot," and a lot of other things besides! But most of us just like to call him Bugs.

Now he's starring in Space Jam, Warner Bros.' first original feature film graced by Bugs in a leading role--opposite Michael Jordan, no less! Producer Ivan Reitman and director Joe Pytka head a team of filmmakers including producers Joe Medjuck and Daniel Goldberg, executive producers Ken Ross and David Falk, and screenwriters Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick and Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod to bring this ambitious and precedent-setting project to life. Starring with Bugs and Michael Jordan are Wayne Knight, Theresa Randle and the voice of Danny DeVito.

Heading the bill in Space Jam with one of the sports world's most entertaining players is a natural opportunity for the venerable Warner Bros. character. After all, Bugs was voted the most popular in the entire short-subject field in the United States and Canada for the year 1945, and then stayed in the Number One spot for the next 16 years straight. Today, in 1996, Bugs continues to draw a crowd--in fact, a recent survey showed him to be the most popular animated character in the world!

When Bugs' classic cartoons were being made and regularly released to theaters in the 1940s and 1950s, it was his stardom in short subjects that skyrocketed his studio to prominence in the animation field.

Part of Bugs' great achievement had been to establish a strong personality who can exist for 7 minutes at a time, show us a facet of his personality, disappear for weeks, months, maybe years at a time, then reappear and still be recognizeable and entertaining. His possibilities were not exhausted by any single episode.

The trick was not to sustain seven minutes, but to live for 50 years. And once you've sustained 56 years of amazing popularity with one generation after another all over the world, it's hardly likely you're going to have much trouble sustaining a 90 minute feature.

Michael Maltese, one of Bugs' writers, remembered that in the old days, a theater's marquee had to say no more than "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" for people to plunk their money down--forgetting what features or other short subjects were playing, forgetting that the "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" would be over in 15 minutes--and, most of all, forgetting their troubles. "After a while, Bugs Bunny was so well loved by the audience that he could do no wrong," said Maltese. "They loved the rabbit, and what he stood for."

Friz Freleng, one of the leading directors of Bugs' classic shorts, once remarked, "The cocky characters, for some reason, the public seems to like. They don't like those kinds of people in real life." Mel Blanc, who first provided The Rabbit's voice, believed that "Bugs Bunny appeals to the rebel in all of us. Everybody loves a winner, and Bugs Bunny always wins."

There's a moment in A Hare Grows in Manhattan when Bugs dives into a manhole to escape the bulldog pursuing him, and between the time the dog leaps in the air and the time he reaches the manhole, Bugs has managed to resurface, grab the manhole cover, and pull it into place--turning the dog's face into something resembling a waffle. It's a simple enough gag, but the point is that there is a look of such total delight on Bugs' face as he performs the act, that he turns the whole business into something else altogether, a conflict of viewpoints rather than a physical conflict between two animals.

Bugs is Puck reborn; he enjoys the scrapes he gets into because he knows he'll win eventually. This goes a long way toward making him the irresistible character he is: he holds out the possibility that the Battle is winnable, that we can vanquish the foe and have fun doing it, that every setback can become another challenge, another excuse for high spirits.

This is possibly the critical factor of what we love about Bugs: that he will not only make us laugh but make us feel victorious and triumphant. There are heroes and there are comedians; rarely do the two meet. This made him a difficult character to write for, but it's what gave him that special spark that made him the phenomenon that he has been.

From the time he first asked Elmer Fudd "What's up, Doc?" right up to the release of Space Jam, Bugs has been both sophisticated and naive, innocent and guilty, Child of Nature and Street-Tough Smart Guy, fool and hero, one of the most rounded and all-around characters in the history of film, a multi-faceted gem.

A Wild Hare and Beyond

No seriously why.