Peter Rabbit is a has-been and Roger Rabbit is an upstart. Only Bugs Bunny reigns supreme as lapin king of the cartoon world-and on Wednesday, CBS will throw him a birthday bash in celebration of his 50th year in show business.
”Happy Birthday, Bugs: 50 Looney Years” will air from 7 to 8 p.m. on WBBM-Ch. 2, and Friz Freleng, his mentor and the shaper of his career, couldn`t decide which was the greater surprise: the famous rabbit`s continuing celebrity or the fact that he is such a contemporary hit on children`s television.
”These films were not made for television; they were made for the theater and we made them with adults in mind,” Freleng said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. ”We never did make them for children, but they wound up appealing to adults and children alike.
”They were just little short things, six minutes long. It`s amazing. Bugs is 50 years old now, so you can imagine how old that makes me.”
Freleng is, in fact, 83, with 63 of those years in animation, and he still is going strong. He got his start with Walt Disney in 1927 and joined Warner Bros. three years later after a brief hiatus in New York where he did the ”Krazy Kat” series.
In his 33 years at Warner Bros., he produced and directed more than 300 cartoons, won five Oscars and acquired a reputation for near genius in the meticulous art of synchronizing action on the screen with vocal and musical background. In 1963, after forming his own firm while still working for Warner, he created the Pink Panther and won his sixth Academy Award.
Freleng now concentrates on promotion of the company`s characters at art galleries, museum shows and on the nationwide lecture circuit, and if he was not the father of Bugs Bunny, he at least reared him from birth.
The original Bugs looked and acted nothing like the one that finally emerged under Freleng`s guidance in 1940. He was a squatty white sendup of Groucho Marx-”a real idiot,” in Freleng`s words-and he got his name from the writer of his first script, Bugs Hardaway.
Freleng, with longtime fellow director Chuck Jones, developed Bugs into his brash, urbane persona, gave him his signature ”What`s up, Doc?” and directed him through more than 100 of his 175 films, ultimately guiding him to an Academy Award.
But it wasn`t easy. Freleng had to fight with a bottom-line-minded management to turn animation into an art form and make real stars of his fantasy characters.
Freleng said Bugs, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and four characters he personally created-Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester Pussycat and the baby-talking canary, Tweetie Pie-initially were developed by Warner Bros. as throwaway vehicles to ”exploit their music company.” They appeared in a musical format called ”Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies,” and they were expected to last no longer than the television commercials that ultimately succeeded them.
”We had to make these things with songs in them to push the studio`s music portfolio,” Freleng said. ”I argued and argued that we also had to develop characters to go with them, and we had to make them different.”
To accomplish that, in a cartoon universe where most of the inhabitants were imitating the squeaky falsetto of Walt Disney`s famous Mickey Mouse, Freleng turned to an unlikely source of inspiration: the speech impediment. It resulted in Porky Pig`s stutter, the rasping lisps effected by Daffy and Sylvester, and Elmer Fudd`s struggle with the letter R, as in ”wascally wabbit.”
”In a human being, it`s pitiful, I guess,” said Freleng, ”but in a cartoon, it`s funny, and I first used it for Porky.”
Freleng said some in theater audiences initially were offended by Porky`s impediment, but Freleng stuck to his guns and they soon fell in love with the character. Initially, Freleng said he employed a man who really did stutter to do Porky`s voice, but because the voicer could not control his stuttering, the film bill soon was in the stratosphere.
”Film was very expensive, and I knew if Jack Warner found out I was wasting so much of it doing take after take, he`d probably kick me off the lot,” Freleng said. ”So I had to get somebody who could imitate a stutterer and control it, and I found a fellow by the name of Mel Blanc.”
Blanc, who died last year, went on to become known as the Man of a Thousand Voices, doing dialogue for nearly every cartoon character on the screen, including Bugs Bunny. To simulate Bugs` continual carrot-crunching, Blanc even chewed carrots, though he hated them. It was, Freleng said, an era of art that has been lost in the plethora of animation that fills children`s television today.
”These new strips are very primitive and limited,” he said. ”They`re just (sound) tracks with little characters moving around. They`re just drawings. When you see Bugs Bunny, you actually feel that he lives somewhere. He`s got depth of character.
”One-dimensional characters are all you see on TV today because of budgets. They have to make them fast, and most of them are made overseas with animators who don`t even understand the language. About all that`s moving is the mouth.”
Freleng was especially affronted by Fox Broadcasting`s runaway cartoon hit, ”The Simpsons,” though he gave it good grades for script writing.
”It`s a good track, but the drawings are as grotesque as they can make them for some reason,” he said. ”I don`t know why the artist has done that. ”You could shut off the picture and still follow the story. It`s radio. We couldn`t have gotten by with that.”
Freleng, hired by CBS as consultant for Bugs Bunny`s 50th anniversary special, said he still wants to work, but not in cartoon animation as it stands today.
”I wouldn`t want to do this limited type of thing like you see on kids`
TV, so I`ll just do the gallery thing with the Warner Bros. characters,” he said. ”I don`t know why I`d want to retire. I`d vegetate if I wasn`t doing something like this and I certainly am not ready to go.
”I love what I`m doing and I`d like to be able to do it a lot longer.”
