{ animated short } All this and Elmer Fudd's pedigree

Bugs Bunny cartoon What's up, Doc?
Exposing a much-beloved character's roots:All this and Rabbit Stew (undated, circa Jun-07), Comprisal [personal blog], online at comprisal.blogspot.com (accessed 05-Aug-07).All this and Rabbit Stew (released 20-Sep-41), directed by Tex Avery, with musical supervision by Carl W. Stalling and voices by Mel Blanc, Warner Bros. Pictures and the Vitaphone Corporation, online at youtube.com [video kk36qmiVBWw].

All this and Rabbit Stew – Which is a pretty cute title for a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1941. But the interest here (click on the image to the left to watch the video) lies in the Black character, who plays Bugs' rifle-wielding foil and who presents a racist version of Elmer Fudd (which suggests that Egghead wasn't Elmer's only predecessor).

This cartoon is one of the Censored Eleven from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies catalogs (which you can read more about below). The cartoon has not been shown on television since 1968 due to offensive content.
All This and Rabbit Stew

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 20, 1941 by Warner Bros. Pictures and The Vitaphone Corporation. It was produced by Leon Schlesinger and directed by an uncredited Tex Avery, with musical supervision by Carl W. Stalling and voices by Mel Blanc.

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, as well as being a pun on "all this and rabbits too". Because the cartoon was released after Avery left Schlesinger, Avery's name does not appear in the credits.

All This and Rabbit Stew features Bugs Bunny being hunted by a slow-witted Black hunter, very similar in speech pattern and mannerism to Stepin Fetchit. After Bugs outwits the hunter several times, Bugs wins all of his clothing through a dice game. Due to the film's stereotyping, All This and Rabbit Stew has not been seen on television since 1968, and is one of the "Censored Eleven" group of banned Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts. It is also the only Bugs Bunny cartoon in the Censored Eleven.

The cartoon was scheduled to air as part of the June Bugs 2001 cartoon marathon on Cartoon Network, even appearing with a warning stating that the cartoon may contain stereotypical depictions that may not be appropriate for some viewers, but at the last minute, this cartoon (along with 10 others) were pulled.

The cartoon's central gag sequence, involving the hunter constantly ending up on the wrong side of a rolling log hanging over a cliff, was repurposed for Bob Clampett's 1946 Looney Tunes short The Big Snooze. For that film, the animation of the Black hunter was redrawn into animation of Elmer Fudd.

All This and Rabbit Stew has fallen into the public domain, and is available on many public domain home video collections.

 

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