Cartoon Saturdays -- Bugs Bunny: Hillbilly Hare

Because it's really not Saturday morning unless I'm watching Bugs Bunny in my underwear -- and because I'm such a generous and benevolent monarch (heh.) -- I thought I'd post this little gem for your cultural edification/amusement/etc.  And you can sing along and everything! Wheeee!

I'm going to serve up a weekly heaping helping of Chuck Jones to the world any Saturday it strikes my fancy.  God, I love him.  How sad am I that we never met.

This stuff will never get old.

saturday classics

when i was a kid, it wasn't really saturday unless i spent the morning watching bugs bunny in my pajamas. so of course nowadays something in me wants to oversleep, crash land on the couch in my underwear and watch cartoons.  i can't think of a better way to start the weekend.

i don't understand people who think that television is bad. i think there's something fundamentally wrong with them -- especially when they watch tv shows on whatever computer they use.

it's not an idiot box. it's whatever you make of it.

i love bugs bunny -- but more importantly, i love chuck jones. he was and still is a constant inspiration. through those wb cartoons, i learned about opera, slapstick, vaudeville and consequently, the proper usage of the lazzi from the classic commedia dell'arte tradition.  because you really can't do comedy without understanding the anatomy of the lazzi -- and nothing teaches it to you like a good bugs bunny cartoon. 

of course, i learned a lot of novelty tunes and tin pan alley songs. sometimes i even sing them on my gigs. more on that some other time.

happy birthday to me!

"in my dreams, i'm bugs bunny -- but when i wake up, i'm daffy duck." - chuck jones

my friend took me to six flags in jackson, nj for my birthday. how cool is that? he also won that marvin the martian for me that i'm holding in the photo above by doing that whole he-man hit-the-stump-with-the-sledgehammer-and-the-pole-lights-all-the-way-up game. he didn't make it "ding" all the way at the top, but he came awfully close.

i love marvin the martian. of course, i never doubted his blackness when i was a little kid. him or darth vader. (or, as logic would have it, darth vader's children.) when i first came to the city, black people in harlem were all about wearing an oversized black t-shirt with marvin's eyes staring out menacingly with a gun barrel pointed at the viewer. them walking towards you in the most casual of circumstances looked like marvin was gunning for you. very effective. there was also another popular one that said "don't ask me 4 shit" in huge letters. heh. in the recent past, it was the warner brothers WB brand and in elaborate WB cursive, with the crest blaring in WB type: "if you see the cops, warn a brotha!"

i don't know when they took over, but warner brothers cartoon characters are everywhere in six flags. i loved it. i'm a massive chuck jones fan. but everywhere i turned, all i could think was, warn a brotha, warn a brotha, warn a brotha. trippy.

no. what was really tripped me out was all the mullets and the doo-rags that were there in full regalia and how bovine everyone was and how loud and bratty and chubby pert near all of the kids were and how almost every young girl dressed like a street-walking whore and the food was plentiful but horribly overpriced. even the water. four dollars for a liter? somebody was definitely tripping on that one.

any amusement park was such a drag when i was a little kid because there was always someone standing there to tell me what i couldn't ride, where i couldn't go, what i couldn't eat. after about a half hour, i was ready to go home. but yesterday, i felt like an 8 year old with a wallet. and a great deal of patience. after awhile, the lines were crazy. my friend remarked that all of it was a lot like war: long stretches of boredom (standing in line) followed by frenzied bursts of action (the ride). my favorite: the great american scream machine. it had not one but four loops. crazy.

my friend insisted on riding the runaway train ride. it's for kiddies really but he used to ride it with his father, who would take him and his brother there often when they were young. before our first big drop and twist, he dedicated our ride to him. that touched me very much.

funny, the things you remember from childhood.