All This and Rabbit Stew
All This and Rabbit Stew is the only Bugs Bunny picture in the Censored Eleven animation shorts.
According to Wikipedia:
- All This and Rabbit Stew is a one-reel animated cartoon short subject in the Merrie Melodies series, produced in Technicolor and released to theatres on September 13, 1941 by Warner Bros. and Vitaphone. It was produced by Leon Schlesinger and directed by Tex Avery (uncredited) with musical supervision by Carl W. Stalling.
- The cartoon was the final Avery-directed Bugs Bunny short to be released. Although it was produced before The Heckling Hare (after the production of which Avery was suspended from the Schlesinger studio and defected to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), it was released afterwards. The title is a parody of that of All This, and Heaven Too (1940), a Bette Davis for the same studio. Because the cartoon was released after Avery left Warner Bros., Avery's name does not appear in the credits.
- After copyright on All This and Rabbit Stew expired in 1969, the film fell into the public domain. The cartoon has been considered highly controversial due to racial stereotyping, which prompted United Artists to withhold this cartoon from syndication a year before it entered the public domain, making it one of the Censored Eleven. The plot has Bugs Bunny hunted by a slow-witted African American hunter who is a caricature of Stepin Fetchit.
The Wikipedia statement that the hunter is "slow-witted" is unfair; he tends to catch on to Bugs's tricks faster than Elmer Fudd does in similar situations.
Watch or download the cartoon at archive.org.
Tropes used in All This and Rabbit Stew include:
- Affectionate Parody: The hunter, a parody of Stepin Fetchit. It was affectionate then; it's cringeworthy now because of Values Dissonance.
- Brick Joke: The skunk.
- Homing Projectile: The hunter's buckshot follows Bugs past a lot of different obstacles. With the buckshot occasionally forming itself into punctuation in the process, this verges on Animate Inanimate Object.
- Older Than They Think: The "giant hollow log at the edge of a cliff" gag from The Big Snooze, Foxy By Proxy, and Person To Bunny was first used here.
- Unfortunate Implications: Bugs finally defeats the hunter in a craps game.
- Wartime Cartoon: "Come out or I'll blitzkreig you!"
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