That Cwazy Wabbit Is Back At The Bwattle — Why We Wuv Him So Much

Originally published on WBUR’s ARTery, 02/10/2016

Bugs Bunny is 76 years old.

Entertainment has changed dramatically since that rabbit first popped out of his hole: YouTube, the Internet, HD, home video, television. The first Bugs Bunny cartoon (1940’s “A Wild Hare,” opposite Elmer Fudd) predates U.S. involvement in World War II, and his last “classic” outing — 1964’s “False Hare” — celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago. In an accelerated youth culture that sees the Jonas Brothers as relics of a forgotten era, Bugs Bunny — and Daffy Duck, and the rest of their animated Warner Brothers stablemates — are positively prehistoric.

Yet, despite media handwringing over our increasingly short-term cultural memory, Bugs and his pals remain instantly recognizable to children around the world. Like their counterparts at Disney, this is partly in thanks to mountains of tie-ins and merchandise, which have grown pretty much uninterrupted since their heyday. But unlike the Mouse, whose cartoons now feel like the propaganda division of a corporate empire, the Looney Tunes canon lives on, both through updated incarnations and, incredibly, the very same shorts that entertained our children’s great grandparents. This month, the Brattle Theatre will unveil the 21st installment of its annual Bugs Bunny Film Festival, comprising three programs worth of favorites from the Warner Brothers archive. The event is a beloved staple of the theater’s programming, regularly playing to packed houses of children and adults alike. So how is it that these six-minute cartoons hold up better than feature films made less than a decade ago?

The short answer is simple: They are really, really funny. The masterminds at Warner Brothers’ animation unit (or Termite Terrace, as it was affectionately known) synthesized the best trends of early 20th century comedy — the wordplay of vaudeville, the physical comedy of silent film, the densely detailed landscapes of early comic strips — and boiled them to a concentrate. In many ways, animation is the ideal medium for the comic auteur: slapstick unbound by physics, staging not reliant on actors, locations and props no more expensive than ink.