Falling Hare
| Falling Hare | |
|---|---|
| Merrie Melodies/Bugs Bunny series | |
Title card
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| Directed by | Bob Clampett |
| Produced by | Leon Schlesinger |
| Story by | Warren Foster |
| Voices by | Mel Blanc |
| Music by | Carl W. Stalling |
| Studio | Leon Schlesinger Productions |
| Distributed by |
Warner Bros. Pictures The Vitaphone Corporation |
| Release date(s) |
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| Color process | Technicolor |
| Running time | 8 minutes (one reel) |
| Language | English |
Falling Hare is a 1943 Warner Bros. cartoon directed by Robert Clampett, and starring Bugs Bunny in the Merrie Melodies series. As with many Bugs Bunny cartoons, the title is a play on words; "falling hair" refers to impending baldness, while in this cartoon’s climax the title turns out to be descriptive of Bugs’s situation (a hare falling / crashing to earth).
This cartoon opens with the title credits over the strains of “Down by the Riverside”, then into an extended series of establishing shots of an Army Air Force base, to the brassy strains of “We’re in to Win” (a World War II song also sung by Daffy Duck in Scrap Happy Daffy two months before). The sign at the base reads "U.S. Army Air Field", and below that is shown the location, the number of planes and number of men, all marked "Censored" as a reference to military secrecy. Beneath those categories, the sign reads "What men think of top sergeant", which is shown with a large white-on-black "CENSORED!!", as the language implied would not pass scrutiny by the Hays Office.
Bugs is found reclining on a piece of ordnance next to a bomber plane, idly reading Victory Thru Hare Power (a spoof of the 1942 book) and laughing uproariously at the book’s claim that gremlins wreck American planes through "di-a-bo-lick-al saa-boh-tay-jee." He immediately encounters one of the creatures, who is experimentally striking the unfused nose of a bomb Bugs is sitting on with a mallet to the tune of “I've Been Working on the Railroad”. Bugs casually asks the gremlin what he’s doing. The gremlin replies that blockbuster bombs like the one in question do not detonate unless they’re struck with perfect precision. Noticing the gremlin’s lack of success, Bugs offers to help him. But after taking the mallet and raising it in preparation to strike the bomb, Bugs suddenly comes to his senses and refrains from following through milliseconds from striking it, screaming "WHAT AM I DOING!" as he does so. He then ponders if the creature in question was a gremlin. The gremlin replies as loud as he could: "It ain’t Vendell Villkie!"
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