Porky's Hare Hunt

Porky's Hare Hunt
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Airdate:	30 April 1938
Series:	Looney Tunes
MPAA Number:	4131
Production Number:	8405
Copyright Renewed:	10 June 1966
Starring:	Porky Pig Happy Rabbit
Crew
Voice Characterizations:	Mel Blanc (uncredited) Ben Hardaway (uncredited)
Director:	Ben Hardaway Cal Dalton (uncredited)
Written By:	Howard Baldwin
Producer:	Leon Schlesinger
Animated By:	Volney White Rod Scribner (uncredited)
Film Editor:	Treg Brown (uncredited)
Musician:	Carl W. Stalling

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Porky's Hare Hunt is a 1938 Looney Tunes short directed by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton.

Plot

Several rabbits are eating carrots and ruining crops. One of the rabbits warns them to evacuate. Soon, Porky and his dog meet him and try to outwit the rabbit in the forest. Porky and the rabbit get in a long, long fight, and soon the hare thinks he has won. Porky finds him, however, and he doesn't have any brainstorms to protect him. The rabbit shows Porky a photo of himself and of how many children he has with his wife.

While Porky attempts to shoot down and procure the rabbit, he befalls to an inundation of quick-witted gags as the rabbit asks Porky: "Do you have a hunting license?" As Porky reaches for his pocket to obtain the document within sight of the hyper-hare, he suddenly snatches it out of Pork's grasp, rips it in two and remarks: "...well you haven't got one now...hoohoohoohoohahahahah..hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha!" and makes a getaway by twisting his ears as though they were a helicopter propeller and flies away. Ultimately, the rabbit wins, with Porky ending up in the hospital from injuries sustained in the ill-fated attempt to catch his game.

Caricatures

• Groucho Marx - "Course you know that this means war!"

Availability

(1985) VHS
Cartoon Collection V

(2012) DVD
Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 2, Disc 2 (restored)

(2012) Blu-ray
Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 2, Disc 2 (restored)

(2017) DVD
Porky Pig 101, Disc 2 (restored)

Streaming

HBO Max (2020 - ) (restored)

Notes

• This is the first appearance of a prototype version of Bugs Bunny that would later became the biggest superstar of Warner Bros. Cartoons.
  • Eventually, the rabbit would make his first official starring role two years later in Tex Avery's Oscar-nominated masterpiece, "A Wild Hare".
• The "Do you have a hunting license?" gag was revived (but modified) in the 1953 short "Duck! Rabbit, Duck!" where Bugs Bunny asks Elmer Fudd, "Do you have a fricasseeing rabbit license?"
• The prototype is seen chewing on a carrot, the only time he is.
• This cartoon also introduces the rabbit repeating a well-known Groucho Marx line for the first time that would become part of Bugs Bunny's lexicon. The exact wording, in this first appearance, is "'Course you know that this means war!" The proto-Bugs' rendering in this cartoon is a direct impression of Groucho, including dropping the trailing "r" of "war".
• This is the first short to be directed by Ben Hardaway since "Buddy in Africa" in 1935, he would continue directing shorts for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series until 1940.
• This is one of the redrawn colorized cartoons that used original theatrical opening and closing titles but retraced.
• The redrawn colorized version used the incorrect 1936-1937 opening title card and 1936-1937 opening music (Porky's Duck Hunt version) instead of the 1937-1938 opening title card and 1937-1938 opening music.
• The laugh of Woody Woodpecker, another Mel Blanc character created two years after this short, strongly resembles that of Proto-Bugs.

Gallery

Porky's Hare Hunt (redrawn)

full redrawn title card

Title card (redrawn colorized, Nickelodeon)

Porky's Hare Hunt (redrawn iris)

An ad in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, SC, 19 June 1938

References

Preceded by None

Bugs Bunny Cartoons 1938

Succeeded by Prest-O Change-O