If Bugs Bunny were to direct his signature inquiry--"What's up, doc?"--toward the modern-day Warner Bros. creative team, he wouldn't be far off. For <I>1001 Rabbit Tales</I>, they've doctored up a batch of classic cartoons featuring the carrot muncher and his bumbling comrades and bundled them, near seamlessly, into a feature-length film. Here's the premise: Bugs and Daffy, both book salesmen, are competing to sell the most copies of a kids' book. Instead of burrowing a beeline to his sales territory (he should have made a left at Albuquerque), Bugs ends up in the castle of Yosemite Sam, here a harem-leading honcho. Sam's pain-in-the-spurs son, Prince Abalaba, needs somebody to read him stories; Bugs, who'd sooner take the job than suffer the alternative, that involving being boiled in oil, signs on. Each rabbit-read narrative replaces a sedate story with a Loony Tunes favorite: In "Jack and the Beanstalk," a canary-keeping giant bellows "Fee, fi, fo, fat, I tawt I taw a puddy tat"; the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" develops a hankering for rabbit stew; "Goldilocks" goes feline as Sylvester swaps his porridge for suffering succotash on behalf of his bratty son. In the end, the varmint finds a way to vamoose, but, being a generous sort of bunny, he doesn't keep the address from his commission-hungry coworker. From there, the feathers fly, as does the rest of this feature, which is undiluted fun for fans of these cartoons from way back as well as those just getting to know the loopy Looney Tunes gang. <I>--Tammy La Gorce</I>
Reader Reviews
The thing that reviewers here seem to be forgetting is when this film was made: the 1980's. "Compilation" cartoons like this were the standard output for Warner Bros. throughout the 80's until they finally started producing original animated material again around 1990. They would produce various half-hour holiday specials each containing three or four cartoons linked by a loose frame story, and later they began doing movie-length ones (such as "Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island" and "Quackbusters") which would get aired on cable. Even as a kid, I knew these spliced-together productions were kind of lame, but even so, I enjoyed seeing my favorite characters in something sort-of-almost new. Mel Blanc did the voices for the linking animation.As a nostalgia buff, I am pleased to see that these old shows still exist, despite the much better material Warner Bros. has produced since then; but they should certainly not be judged by the standards of either the classic original shorts or new animation that WB has produced since the 1990's.
Of the 80's "compilation" films, The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie is the first and definitely the best, because there is no attempt at a framing narrative. The linking animation simply has Bugs at his most charming (Chuck Jones directed these interstitial sequences) introducing each short.
Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie is broken into three segments, and it works reasonably well, too.
Of the other three, which do use a framing narrative, Quackbusters is the best, because it actually contains two brand new shorts in their entirety (QB was produced around the time that Warner Animation was finally waking up again from its twenty-odd year slumber), and also because they used splices of the original cartoons' music soundtracks instead of new background music, which makes the transitions from old to new material feel less jarring. Still, Quackbusters, 1001 Rabbit Tales, and Fantastic Island are weak films.
For NEW original cartoons starring the Looney Tunes characters, you should certainly check out "Carrotblanca" (oh man... casting Tweety as Peter Lorre is one of the funniest things I've ever seen...) and "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" (I gather that it's not selling many tickets, which is a pity. I saw it with my brother and his family, and we all laughed our heads off.). I'd skip "Space Jam"--it was amusing for the novelty of seeing the toons interact with real live actors, but that's about all there was to it; "Back In Action" captures their personalities much better, and Joe Alaskey does an admirable job voicing the characters.
Oh---and since it was made by Warner Animation, I'll put in a plug for "The Iron Giant," the most wonderful, underappreciated animated film of the last decade.
