Hare Conditioned (1945)

Interesting facts

Hare Conditioned is a 1945 Warner Bros. cartoon in the Looney Tunes series. It was directed by Chuck Jones and features Bugs Bunny.

Production notes

The Stacey's (pun on Macy's) manager was voiced by Dave Barry except for the line "Now I'll finish you off!", which were voiced by Mel Blanc. His voice was based on Harold Peary's character Dr. Gildersleeve from the radio program The Great Gildersleeve, which was mentioned by Bugs in the middle of the cartoon.

The title is a play on "air conditioned"; before air conditioning became widely used, it was sometimes advertised as incentive for the public to visit department stores, where they could avoid the heat of a hot day and, ideally for the store, make purchases. Hare Conditioned was the second Bugs Bunny cartoon in the Looney Tunes series.

Hare Conditioned uses many of the same limited animation techniques which Jones had previously introduced in The Dover Boys two years prior, including smear frames and sliding backgrounds.

The camping scene, soon revealed to be part of the window display for a department store is an outdoor recreation turned into an illusion. The taxidermy department represents "a more deadly artificial display on nature". Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann argue that these serve as monuments to a disappearing natural world.

This animated short contains a reference to wartime shortages. Bugs impersonates an elevator operator and introduces the items available on the sixth floor: rubber tires, girdles, nylon hosiery, bobby pins, alarm clocks, bourbon, butter, and other picture postcards. These were indeed rare items during World War II.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.