Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales

Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie 1001 Rabbit Tales
Directed by	Friz Freleng Chuck Jones Robert McKimson
Produced by	Friz Freleng
Written by	Warren Foster Michael Maltese Tedd Pierce
Starring	Mel Blanc June Foray Lennie Weinrib
Music by	Robert J. Walsh Carl Stalling (classic cartoons) Milt Franklyn (classic cartoons) William Lava (classic cartoons)
Cinematography	Nick Vasu
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	November 19, 1982
Running time	77 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales is a 1982 Looney Tunes film with a compilation of classic Warner Bros. cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences, hosted by Bugs Bunny. The episodes included are:

• 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
• Ali Baba Bunny
• Tweety and the Beanstalk
• Bewitched Bunny
• Goldimouse and the Three Cats
• Red Riding Hoodwinked
• The Pied Piper of Guadalupe & Mexican Boarders (with the story ending with beginning and ending of the former)
• One Froggy Evening
• Aqua Duck (flipped and only shown up to the point where Daffy realizes the pool of water is a mirage)

Plot

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have to sell books for Rambling House. They go their separate ways and experience many wacky things. After a little while, Bugs comes across Sultan Yosemite Sam's palace in the Arabian desert. Sam needs someone to read to his spoiled brat son, Prince Abadaba (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 Abadaba.

Bugs tries to escape on a flying carpet from the palace, but Sam catches him. Meanwhile, Daffy stumbles upon a cave of gold and tries to make off with the treasure. But a genie does not like what he was doing and chases him out of the cave. Daffy wanders through the desert and soon sees the palace, hoping to sell books there. Bugs luckily escapes and tries to warn Daffy about the palace, but he would not listen. He found out the hard way and the two walk off with Daffy missing all of his feathers.

Most of the rest of the movie consists of the stories played out as classic cartoons. Some of the classic cartoon shorts were abridged. In the One Froggy Evening sequence, the ending where the construction worker from 2056 finds Michigan J. Frog and makes off with him was cut, making it seem as if the cartoon ended with the construction worker from 1955 getting rid of the frog and running off.

This was the first Looney Tunes compilation film to use a completely original story and treat the included cartoon shorts as part of the story, as opposed to having the characters introduce the cartoons.

Cast

• Mel Blanc - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester, Sylvester, Jr., Speedy Gonzales, Tweety, Genie, Hassan, Big Bad Wolf, Beanstalk Giant, Elvis Gorilla, Stork
• Arthur Q. Bryan - Elmer Fudd (archive footage)
• June Foray - Granny
• Shepard Menken - Old Storyteller
• Lennie Weinrib - Prince Abba Dabba

Production

The main plot point, setting up Bugs and Daffy as Scherezade figures, is in itself similar to the 1959 short Hare-abian Nights, which itself used considerable stock footage and also featured Yosemite Sam as the sultan.

Another interesting aspect of this film is that many voice artists that were not credited in the original shorts are billed as "additional classic voices". For the first time, over twenty years after his death, Arthur Q. Bryan receives credit on a Warner Bros. production, even if it does fail to credit him as the voice of Elmer Fudd.

The film marks the first time that a Warner cartoon compilation feature used classic cartoon footage from more than one director. One Froggy Evening, Bewitched Bunny and Ali Baba Bunny were directed by Chuck Jones, and Aqua Duck was directed by Robert McKimson, while all other classic shorts included were directed by Freleng.

Reception

Carrie Rickey, reviewer for the Village Voice, remarked that Bugs and Daffy "used to be burrowers, explorers; now they're traveling salesmen imprisoned by the nuclear family."

External links

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