The famous name was accidental. In 1938, when almost the only well-defined character on the lot was Porky Pig, a director who answered to Bugs Hardaway thought a rabbit might play nicely opposite Porky, and commissioned one from the resident character designer. The designer, a Disney alumnus named Charles Thorson, sent back a model sheet headed “Bugs’ bunny.”
Who it was had the genius to perceive the fitness of “Bugs” no one seems to remember. Hardaway’s film, Porky’s Hare Hunt, featured a rounded nervous rabbit, crouched, always ready to leap for an exit; but “the Bugs that evolved,” Chuck Jones remarks, “stood upright, a guy who’s not going to go anyplace—sure of himself.”
A Wild Hare (1940) was the first presentation. Not only have we for the first time Elmer Fudd’s “Be vewy, vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits!” and Bugs’s sharp “What’s up, Doc?” we have also, as Friz Freleng remembers, something utterly new: “A rabbit so cocky that he wasn’t afraid of a guy with a gun who was hunting him.” All connection with timidity, with cuteness, is severed.
“Bugs went through a period of wild awkwardness before settling into the self-contained studied attitudes peculiar to him,” Jones remembers, “so that his every movement is Bugs and Bugs only, just as his speech developed from a kind of vaudevillian patois loaded with ‘deses’ and ‘doses’ to a fully cadenced speech in which he studiously inserts an occasional ‘ain’t’ in the same casual way as an Oxford graduate does.” In sum, “We discovered the enormous difference between being crazy—as in A Wild Hare—and playing at being crazy.”
Jones is explicit about the origin of his personal Bugs. “I could not animate a character I could laugh at but could not understand. A wild wild hare was not for me; what I needed was a character with the spicy, somewhat erudite introspection of a Professor Higgins, who, when nettled or threatened, would respond with the swagger of D’Artagnan as played by Errol Flynn, with the articulate quick-wittedness of Dorothy Parker—in other words, the Rabbit of My Dreams.”
* * *
Note: The above is a quotation, slightly edited, from:
Hugh Kenner, Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, pp. 78ff.
A HyC Presentation