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Comment count is 5
Xenocide - 2018-08-03

Rhapsody Rabbit was actually the cause of feud between MGM and Warner Bros. It's a really weird Bugs Bunny cartoon: one of the very few instances where Bugs actually loses in the end, and his opponent is just a nameless, silent mouse who never appeared again.

The same year, MGM released an extremely similar Tom and Jerry cartoon called Cat Concerto, and before long both studios were accusing each other of plagiarism. The dispute made it all the way to the Oscars, where both cartoons were nominated for best short. Tom and Jerry won.

By the time Cartoon Network came along, the rights to both cartoons were owned by Turner, and CN would sometimes play them back to back, alongside a short documentary about the feud.

Of course this was back when CN was a repository for classic animation and not a machine designed to play the same five episodes of Teen Titans Go until the sun burns out.


yogarfield - 2018-08-03

Info like this is why I keep coming back to this skeleton ship. I grew up with the Tom and Jerry version, so I take their side. Bugs Bunny is, and will always be, a hateful piece of shit.

So is Jerry. Long live Tom!


cognitivedissonance - 2018-08-04

Bugs Bunny is what the American culture needed at the time. Sam Warner was REALLY focused on utilizing his power to fight the rise of fascism, and what you see in the broader Warner Brothers output was a very consistent championing of the individual over the corporate in everything they did between the onset of the Depression and the end of WW2. This is also why he made so many gangster dramas and detective features, it wasn't just because they were cheap to make (although they were), it was because gangsters and Sam Spade types were EXTREMELY liberating narrative devices for Americans at the time. Even when the Warners made huge, clockwork precise, Busby Berkeley musicals, it was at the service of stories about urban everymen like Dick Powell.

Bugs Bunny takes the established order of things and creates chaos. Mickey Mouse takes chaos and brings it into order, even if that order is absurd. Bugs Bunny is the American Dionysus, Mickey Mouse is the American Apollo. We needed both extremes to win the war.


cognitivedissonance - 2018-08-04

One other Warner Brothers story: after Snow White was released, Jack Warner sent a telegram to Walt Disney, telling him he had earned a raise. He knew so little about his own animation department that he believed Disney was his employee.


Seven Arts/H8 Red - 2018-08-04

To be fair, Warner Bros.' Harman-Ising and early Leon Schlesinger Productions cartoons chased after the rubber-hose inkblot character/sheet-music-shilling dollar. Harman-Ising had previously worked for Disney, so WB didn't get out of Mickey-baiting until characters like Porky Pig started to take off. Rhapsody Rabbit/Cat Concerto has an antecedent in Bosko moving to MGM, and Schlesinger trying to brute-force Buddy into cartoon stardom in response.


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