Rapid Rabbit

[Matthew Hunter]

Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too: I just re-taped this the other day, and couldn't help noticing how lame it is. The animation is funny, the music is great, but what a stupid concept! How Road-Runner ripoff can you get? He even runs around honking a horn. In my opinion, this is one of the worst 1960's cartoons. Anyone else agree? Disagree?
-Matthew

[Matt Yorston]

Well, I can't rightly comment as I have never seen the cartoon in my life (am REALLY desperate to see it, though) but it seems to me to be one of the better cartoons of the 1960's. Yes, it is a blatant rip-off of the superior Road Runner series right down to the horn-honking but, IMHO, it would be very interesting to see a "Road Runner" gag done OUTSIDE of the Road Runner series (just to see how a similar sort of gag would be done in a different cartoon scenario). For this reason, I am eager to give it a try... I probably will like it, believe it or not. Plus some of the gags I've heard from it (the cannon gag; the fox both crashing into a glass wall and being hit by a car leading to his being filled full of water at a nearby gas station) do indeed sound funny to me.

Maybe I'm just weird... who knows??? :D

[Pilmedium]

I think it is lame. Did they not have the rights to use the Roadrunner? I think there were lots of bad cartoons in the 1960s. This is only one of them. I really don't think it is interesting to see gags outside of a series.

[Howard Fein]

Originally posted by Matthew Hunter
Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too: I just re-taped this the other day, and couldn't help noticing how lame it is. The animation is funny, the music is great, but what a stupid concept! How Road-Runner ripoff can you get? He even runs around honking a horn. In my opinion, this is one of the worst 1960's cartoons. Anyone else agree? Disagree?
-Matthew

The first time I saw RABBIT STEW AND RABBITS TOO, or part of it, was when a minute or so was shown as a between-shorts clip on the NBC 1978-82 DAFFY DUCK SHOW. The extremely jazzy Lava score and abundant use of H-B sound effects (introduced to WB shorts when Hendricks took over) made it unrecognizable as a WB short. :confused:

The short as shown in its entirety does scream Roadrunner rip-off: lack of dialogue; pursuing character's elaborate capturing gadgets violently backfiring against him; overconfident would-be target of pursuer. The rabbit honking its horn seems a deliberate attempt to imitate either the Road Runner or Harpo Marx.

Supposedly, the short was meant to be a pilot for a new series-wouldn't THAT have been monotonous to continue the premise and characters in multiple cartoons? :yawn: But the final 1969 closure of the studio prevented that from happening.

Nonetheless, I liked the score enough to audio-tape the entire cartoon. Lava's work seemed to improve in the Hendricks era; the music heard for the Cool Cat, Merlin and Bunny & Claude shorts are much more energetic, and evocative of the action on screen than what we heard from 1962 to 1964. The character animation also seems quite a bit more vivid than Lovy's Daffy and Speedy.

The gag in which the fox ends up on the car hood and gets his 'radiator' filled is quite funny. :)