Title - Knighty Knight Bugs
Director - Friz Freleng
Released - 1958
Interesting Fact -- May I have the envelope, please? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the only Bugs Bunny cartoon to ever win an Oscar.
Reason for Placement --
Using Freleng's usual method of placing our characters in historic locations, Bugs finds himself the court jester of King Arthur himself, who is looking for someone to retrieve his mystical Singing Sword from the Black Knight (played by everyone's favorite hot-tempered villain, Yosemite Sam). Bugs tells the King that, "Only a fool would go after the singing sword!" King Arthur's response: "A good idea... Fool!!" And so Bugs is sent to retrieve the sword from the Black Knight and his fire-breathing dragon.
Freleng and writer Warren Foster really outdid themselves with this masterpiece, it's probably one of the most well-written toons to come out of Warner Bros. The visual gags here are plenty, but the one-liners that Bugs and Sam throw back at one another give this short a real life that most other cartoons never got close to touching. It really all goes back to Freleng's remarkable sense of timing: it wasn't just with music and sound effects, it applied to the character's lines as well.
It's also probably worth mentioning that the Oscar for this short was a major plot-point in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, titled, "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny?" In the episode, Bugs is kidnapped by a jealous rival, Slap-Happy Stanley the Elephant, whose cartoon he beat out for the Academy Award. While Stanley was never seen outside this short, it does parody another cartoon, Terrytoon's Sidney's Family Tree (staring Sidney the Elephant), which was indeed nominated the same year as Knighty Knight Bugs.
This is not a masterpiece, just a regular Sam/Bugs effort, one of the lesser ones I say.
ReplyDeleteYou look to be obsessed with the post-55 cartoons seeing your list. I prefer the more energetic, better animated and less formulaic cartoons from the 40s. But to each his own.
Huh. To be frank, I wouldn't put this higher than a short like "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" or "Rabbit of Seville", but it's decent enough. Though in terms of BB historical epics, I prefer "Roman Legion Hare" (1955)
ReplyDeleteWow, can't believe that anyone dissed this tune, it's one of my all-time faves. The buck-toothed dragon alone makes this worth seeing - the drawings of him, the way he moves, the way he runs leaving little puffs of smoke on the way, all have me howling every time, but the best part is when he sneezes and heats up Sam's armor, very clever. I also love the scenes of Sam shoveling coal into him, again very creative. One of my favorite lines from any cartoon is "dragons is sooo stupid!", not super clever but the way Mel Blanc says it is primo.
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