Really Surprised!

Pretty Good

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

. . . and the backdrop of KNIGHT-MARE HARE hardly qualifies as King Arthur's Court. Sir Osis of Liver makes one of his frequent Looney Tunes cameos, but Wart, Gunny, and Lance are a triangle nowhere in sight. Ditto Sagramore, Lionel, Morgan, Mordred, and the rest of the Round Table Crew. There is a Merlin here, but he turns out to be a bit of an ass. Bugs could give Mark Twain's hero a few tips, such as always being sure to bring your lucky rabbit's foot to a joust. Though fire-breathing dragons were more up George's alley than Art's, Bugs shows that a bottle of seltzer water goes a long way toward soothing the savage beast. The wily rabbit does NOT introduce bicycles or "Hello, Central" to whatever court might be in session here, but he does find that when you need a wormhole to successfully navigate the Space\Time Continuum, apples will fill the bill just fine. To quote the Scarecrow, too bad that Dorothy did not want any of the Enchanted Tree's "wormy little apples." One of them could have taken her back to Kansas in nothing flat.

Written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Chuck Jones, "Knight-Mare Hare" is a weird Bugs Bunny cartoon. It seems that Bugs gets knocked unconscious while using an "ear dryer" (?) and ends up in medieval times. His nemeses: a knight, a dragon, and a sorcerer.My favorite scenes? There aren't very many. Bugs mentions his friends the Duke of Ellington, Count of Basie, Earl of Hines, Cab of Calloway, and Satchmo of Armstrong (this joke is quite dear to my heart because I am a jazz musician). During the knight's joust with Bugs, the knight's horse trips and falls, throwing the knight high into the air and inside a castle window, where he falls down a lengthy staircase with numerous crashing sounds.As I said, "Knight-Mare Hare" is a strange cartoon. If you miss it, you're probably not missing much.

For most of Chuck Jones's "Knight-Mare Hare" - the first cartoon in which he billed himself as "Chuck Jones", as opposed to the earlier "Charles M. Jones" - it looked as though the cartoon was one of the shorts holding the places in between the really great ones. But I really laughed when Bugs Bunny rattled off the names of his friends: Duke of Ellington, Count of Basie and Satchmo of Armstrong! That's probably the main reason that it's a good thing that I saw this cartoon now, when I'm old enough to understand it; I can guarantee you that at six years old, I'd never heard of Louis Armstrong or any of those guys, so I wouldn't have known what to think when Bugs named them.But aside from that, it's a pretty funny cartoon, as Bugs gets knocked out and dreams that he's in medieval England, and proceeds to turn everything upside down. Worth seeing.

Long before the invention of the DVD, aye, even before every household had at least one VCR player, there was 8 mm film. Next to blank tapes for your own home movies you could buy selected bits from completed films, with or without sound (depending on the capabilities of your projector). My father used to buy films from the silent era and Loony Tunes. The very last one he got was called "La Magia", a 3 minuted black and white edit of "Knightmare Hare".For some reason the editors deemed the exposition part unnecessary, so they removed the scene where Bugs Bunny gets knocked out by a falling apple while reading "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". They also skipped the part with the Black Knight, leaving "La Magia" to open with Bugs angrily talking to himself (no idea what he's saying) while wearing a robe. Then a Dragon who looks like a cross between "The Reluctant Dragon" and "Pete's Dragon" runs past.After easily getting rid of the fire breather, Bugs enters a tower where (according to the mailbox) Merlin Monroe resides. Apparently there were many more puns uttered in this cartoon, but I have yet to hear them. Merlin looks like Witch Hazel's brother just escaped from the loony bin. He even has one of those little propeller caps that only little kids and total fruitcakes are allowed to wear. Beside the historical inaccurate garb, the dreamlike atmosphere is made even more apparent by the use of one dimensional checkered floors in Castle Monroe. Richard Williams' epic 30 year production "The Thief and the Cobbler" would make even greater and stranger use of this idea. Merlin decides to try out his Magic Powder on Bugsy, but POUF, the magic Bunny has some tricks of his own up his sleeve (and under his thumb).Since they cut out the set up, the bit with Bugs waking up beneath the tree also had to go, and suddenly Mr. B is back in a robe for the usual did-he-or-didn't-he? coda. Although this was not the most enjoyable Loony Toon in our little home collection, being able to dissect 3 minutes of Warner animation by playing it at different speeds, in reverse and freeze frame made me appreciate the art of animation even more. Maybe somewhere in time I might find the complete version.4 out of 10 (not a bad score for half a cartoon)Update: finally having tracked down the complete version, it turns out I had not seen half of it. It turns out an apple fell on Bugs' hairdryer (he had 'just washed his ears' ) while reading "Tales of knighthood and gallantry" by Burton. This set up leads to a namedropping encounter with a knight, Sir O of K. Bugs is really out of his league in the physical department, being unable to lift his sword, but still manages to outwit Mel Blanc's English accented oaf. The encounter with the Dragon/Horney toad is a lot better with the sound effects, funnier too. Now that I know at last how Bugs figures out how to get back to the present (he uses another apple), I must revise my original rating and give this legendary caper7 out of 10