Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales

Original Title Card

Theatrical Poster

Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (also known as Bugs Bunny's 1001 Rabbit Tales) is a 1982 Looney Tunes film with a compilation of classic Warner Bros. cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences, starring Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck.

1990s Alternate Title Card (as seen on the early 1990s VHS releases

Plot

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have to sell books for Rambling House. They go their separate ways and experience many wacky things. For instance, while flying through a winter storm, Daffy ran into a house owned by Porky Pig and briefly stayed there while taking place of a stuffed duck which he merely destroyed. Meanwhile Bugs burrowed his way to a jungle where he pretended to be a baby ape to an ape couple. One half of the couple wanted to do Bugs in, but manages to divert him after he accidentally dropped a boulder on his wife's head.

After a little while, Bugs & Daffy reunite and burrowed their way to a cave at a dry desert. Inside, were treasures consisting of gold, jewels and stuff. The greedy duck tries to take the treasure, but he ran into Hassan the guard and made a mad dash back to Bugs who tricked Hassan into climbing into the clouds. Daffy ran back into the cave in excitement.

Later, Bugs comes across Sultan Yosemite Sam's palace in the Arabian desert. Sam needs someone to read a series of stories to his spoiled brat son, Prince Abba-Dabba (whose appearance resembles to the bespectacled boy from "A Waggily Tale"). When Bugs first meets the tyke and gets mocked, he objects to the idea of reading to him. Then, Sam threatens to make Bugs bathe in boiling oil, at which point Bugs agrees to read to Abba-Dabba. Bugs tries to escape in a variety of ways but to no avail. At one point, Bugs even escaped on a flying carpet from the palace, but Sam catches him.

Meanwhile, Daffy tries to make off with the treasure. As he finished with it, he makes a quick check to see if he missed anything. That's when he encountered a magic lamp with a genie inside. Initially he rubbed the lamp to let the genie out, but Daffy pushed him back down thinking he was trying to steal the treasure. But the genie does not like what he was doing and chases him out of the cave by casting dangerous spells on him. Daffy then wanders through the desert in a separate search for water.

Back at the palace, Bugs is fed up with reading stories to the prince, so he dumps his book in the fire. As he was being threatened to be dunked in boiling oil, Bugs warns Sam not to throw him in a nearby hole which Sam eventually did. Little did Sam & Abba-Dabba realize that this was Bugs' ticket to freedom. So Bugs luckily escapes and ran into Daffy. Daffy was pleased to see Bugs and soon sees the palace, hoping to sell books there. Bugs tries to warn Daffy about the palace, but he would not listen. He found out the hard way and the two walk off into the sunset with Daffy missing all of his feathers.

Included Cartoons

• "Cracked Quack" - Daffy's line, "We'll just put it away in the storage for the winter", is replaced with, "Thermopolis will just have to wait."
• "Apes of Wrath" - Bugs' line, "So I'll be a monkey", is replaced with, "I'll sell books later."
• "Wise Quackers" - The opening where Daffy is flying and crash-lands like a plane on a farm and onto a pitchfork and encounters Elmer Fudd
• "Ali Baba Bunny" - ending to cartoon appears later on with Bugs removed
• "Tweety and the Beanstalk"
• "Bewitched Bunny" - Ends abruptly after the confused prince leaves the house upon learning from Bugs that he's in the wrong fairytale
• "Goldimouse and the Three Cats" - Bugs read's the narrator's lines.
• "A Sheep in the Deep" - Note: Only shown on early TV airings (like on CBS, Disney Channel, and Family Channel) in the 80's and 90s.
• "Red Riding Hoodwinked"
• "The Pied Piper of Guadalupe" and "Mexican Boarders" - This story used the latter in the middle and the beginning and ending of the former.
• "One Froggy Evening" - The ending was cut off when the man puts Michigan J. Frog back to where he first found him and quietly makes his getaway.
• "Aqua Duck" - flipped and only shown up to the point where Daffy realizes the pool of water is a mirage

Music

• Although this cartoon uses "Merrily We Roll Along" over the Warner Communications logo, it uses "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" as its closing theme.

Original Television Airings

When the movie first aired on TV in the mid-80s on CBS, it was shown with the cartoons edited, and added a cartoon shown exclusively in this version. This was also aired on The Disney Channel, and Family Channel during the 1990s.

Most of the sequences in the classic cartoons were cut due to them being violent or to save room for the commercial timeslots on CBS airings. The sequences cut were:

• The parts in "Cracked Quack" when Daffy talks to the stuffed duck was shortened, Daffy smashing the fly with his eyes was deleted, Daffy throwing a bone to Rover out the window, and the Ducks seeing Daffy from the window.
• "Goldimouse and the Three Cats" was severely edited removing these following sequences:
  • Goldimouse was trying to find a bed to sleep on.
  • Mama Cat's lines "And someone's been eating my porridge.", "And someone's been sleeping in my bed.", Sylvester Junior's line "And somebody's been eating my porridge, and thank goodness it's all gone.", and Goldimouse's line "A nasty old cat!"
  • Sylvester trying to get Goldimouse but then she bops him in the head with a mallet.
  • Every sequence of Sylvester setting up traps to get Goldimouse, leaving only one scene from where Sylvester lights up dynamite on the cheese, then cuts to where Mama Cat and Sylvester Junior walking into their bomb shelter while reading their books.

Because of the cuts and edits to the cartoons in the film, this version includes a sequence that was exclusive to TV airings to replace those deleted scenes. It took place after Bugs finished reading the story of Goldimouse and the Three Cats to Prince Abba-Dabba, he told the next story to Abba-Dabba, Little Bo Peep which featured the 1962 Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog cartoon "A Sheep in the Deep".

This version has not been released on home video. Since the 2000s, the original theatrical version is currently shown on TV.

Notes

• The plot of this movie is similar to that of "Hare-abian Nights", in which Bugs Bunny was forced to tell stories. Yosemite Sam was also portrayed as an antagonistic Sultan in the same short, and like this movie, the "stories" in the same short involve the re-use of footage from older cartoons.
• The character design for Prince Abba-Dabba is similar to that of the boy named Junior from "A Waggily Tale".
• The closing card is the 1956-1957 "That's All Folks" Merrie Melodies card with the "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" closing theme.
• Elmer Fudd's original voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan was never credited onscreen in the classic shorts during his lifetime. In this film, Bryan receives onscreen credit for the first and only time in history, albeit posthumously, since he died in 1959, about 24 years before this film came out. For this film, archival recordings of by Bryan was used to voice the Elmer Fudd character in newly-animated parts of the "Wise Quackers" sequence.

Videos

Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie- 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) Official Trailer - Mel Blanc Looney Tunes Movie HD

External Link

• Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales at the Internet Movie Database