Chuck Jones

I think it’s Chuck Jones’s “Broom-Stick Bunny.” I think I have a real fondness for Halloween stories where trick-or-treating turns disastrous, whether it’s for Bugs in this cartoon or Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me In St. Louis (one of the few movies that portrays kids playing old-fashioned Halloween games, where they literally try to be evil). It is kind of a spooky concept.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beeevvndN2c

The “Witch Hazel” character had already appeared in an even funnier cartoon, “Bewitched Bunny,” where she was voiced by Bea Benaderet. By the time they made this follow-up, Benaderet had quit doing voices for WB (she did most of the female characters in the ’40s and early ’50s), so in “Broom-Stick Bunny” she was replaced by June Foray, who did a great job. (Foray was never able to match Benaderet’s work as Granny in the Tweety cartoons, though.)

But Foray had already used a similar voice for another character called “Witch Hazel,” in the Disney Halloween cartoon “Trick Or Treat.” Jones told Foray that Disney couldn’t sue because Witch Hazel is an actual product, so nobody owned the name. Anyway, here’s another Halloween cartoon adventure, Donald Duck and Witch Hazel in “Trick Or Treat.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skdVouumMk4

Also, via the excellent Chuck Jones blog, here are some layout drawings Jones made for the end of “Broom-Stick Bunny” (they were for the animators, as a guide to how the scene should look; at his best, Jones’s layout drawings were some of the most expressive in the business. That’s why his best cartoons had such terrific, memorable character poses and expressions):

This counts as a TV post because many of us grew up watching these things on TV: I am reminded that this is the 60th anniversary of the very first Road Runner cartoon (which was released to theatres on September 17, 1949). Nobody really thought that “Fast and Furry-ous” would be the start of a long-running series; Chuck Jones intended it as a sort of reducto ad absurdum of all the “chase” cartoons that were proliferating at the time, almost a self-parody of the rituals and rules that go into making a cartoon like this. Of course it caught on and became the pilot for a popular series that we all loved because it was so formulaic, and because the only question in every scene was just how the Coyote would fail. And from the very first film, most of the elements were in place: the fake Latin names, the “meep-meep” voice provided by background artist Paul Julian, and even the choice of a dance from Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride as the theme song.

Let’s let Mama and Junyer Bear show us how to celebrate Father’s Day. Remember, “G-U-N-P-O-W-D-E-R” spells “Tobacco.” (A scene, by the way, that was cut when I grew up watching this on ABC. I don’t know if they objected to the smoking or the explosions.)