In Bugs Bunny’s first appearance on film, he didn’t look or sound like himself. The year was 1938 and the film was a seven-minute cartoon called “Porky’s Hare Hunt.”
Porky Pig looked and sounded okay, but the hare, named Happy Rabbit, hadn’t yet morphed into Bugs Bunny.
The plot of the cartoon was simple: Porky and his bloodhound were hunting rabbits. Despite repeated efforts to shoot Happy with a double-barreled shotgun, all Porky got was comic abuse.
Near the end, Happy asks Porky if he has a hunting license. Porky, law-abiding pig that he is, produces the license for inspection. The hare snatches it away, tears it up, and says, “Well, you don’t have one now!”
Porky was, by 1938, well established, having made his first appearance three years earlier. He began as a minor character in a cartoon called “I Haven’t Got a Hat.” The portly, stuttering pig was an instant hit and soon had cartoons of his own.
Porky Pig’s speech problem, by the way, was real. The voice actor who portrayed him, Joe Dougherty, had a pronounced stutter, which he couldn’t control. As a result, recording sessions took hours. As Porky’s popularity grew, it became too expensive to have Dougherty do the voice. Eventually, Mel Blanc, who could stutter on cue, became Porky’s voice. (For more about Blanc, see this week’s Kids’ Page.)
Friz Freleng, who directed some of the early cartoons, had two childhood classmates nicknamed Porky and Piggy. That’s where Porky Pig got his name.
Bugs Bunny’s name was an accident. In the late 1930s, there were some changes in personnel at the Schlesinger/Warner Bros. studio. One of the changes was that a man named Ben Hardaway became a director. Hardaway’s nickname was Buggsy, and a lot of people called him Bugs.
Hardaway had been a co-director of “Porky’s Hare Hunt” two years earlier. To identify which team was working on projects featuring the hare, paperwork connected to the projects was labeled Bugs’ Bunny, meaning these were Bugs Hardaway’s projects relating to the rabbit.
By 1940, when a cartoon called “A Wild Hare” was in production, the name Bugs Bunny had been used so many times in connection to the hare character, it became his name, even though Hardaway didn’t work on that particular cartoon.
Bugs Bunny’s nemesis in “A Wild Hare” isn’t Porky Pig, but Elmer Fudd, who in coming years would be heard to repeatedly complain about that “wasskawie wabbit.”
Bugs, Porky, and Elmer were part of what is called the golden age of American animation. It began in 1928 with the advent of sound cartoons and lasted until the late 1960s, when cartoons transitioned from movie theaters to television.
During that golden era, many characters were created, ranging from Mickey Mouse to Wile E. Coyote, from Tweety and Sylvester to Woody Woodpecker, from Pepé Le Pew to Mr. Magoo.
Their personalities and slapstick humor kept me entertained well into my teenage years and beyond. In fact, Tweety’s, “I tawt I taw a pooty tat,” can still make me laugh.
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