Before Bugs
Every character index needs a first appearance, and the ledger's Bugs Bunny entry has the same one Warner Bros. uses: A Wild Hare, July 27, 1940, Tex Avery. But the checklist does not let anyone off that easily, because sitting in the boxes before it are four cartoons starring a rabbit who is obviously, and officially is not, Bugs Bunny. He is white, then gray. He is unhinged, then calmer. He is unnamed, then named, then renamed. The usual shorthand for this creature is Happy Rabbit, and the best fact in this whole file is that the shorthand is wrong too. The rabbit before Bugs did not even get to keep his own fake name. Here is the pre-history, one tickable box at a time.
Four rabbits, four boxes
It starts in Porky's Hare Hunt, April 1938, from Ben Hardaway's unit: a small white rabbit heckling Porky through a formula borrowed directly from the previous year's duck-hunt cartoon that had introduced Daffy, which is why Hardaway's own description of the character, a Daffy Duck in a rabbit suit, has never been improved upon. The rabbit came back as a magician's prop in Chuck Jones's Prest-O Change-O, then got his one true starring vehicle in Hare-um Scare-um, August 1939, now redesigned in gray by Charles Thorson. A quieter, rounder version turned up opposite a prototype Elmer in Jones's Elmer's Candid Camera, and then Avery's A Wild Hare arrived and the character everyone recognizes walked out of the rabbit hole fully formed, asked his question, and retired his ancestor. Almost. The prototype got one last cameo in Patient Porky, released a month after A Wild Hare, meaning the first Bugs outlived his own replacement. The ledger counts all of these, because they are all real releases with real boxes; the only question is what name to file the rabbit under, and that question turns out to be the whole story.
The name that arrived early
The name Bugs Bunny did not debut with the character. It debuted before him. When Thorson drew the new gray design for Hare-um Scare-um, he labeled the model sheet as the Bunny belonging to Bugs, because the sheet was for Ben Hardaway's unit and Hardaway's nickname was Bugs. It was a possessive, a piece of studio paperwork, the animation equivalent of writing a colleague's name on a folder. And then it escaped: by August 1939, a full year before A Wild Hare, the name Bugs Bunny was appearing in a trade-paper review of Hare-um Scare-um, on the copyright sheet, and in promotional material. The sources cannot even agree where the apostrophe sat, rendering it three different ways, which is the kind of dispute this site collects the way other sites collect cels. By the time Avery perfected the character, the name was waiting for him. The paperwork got there first.
The name that arrived forty years late
So where does Happy Rabbit come from? Not from 1938. The name appears in no credit, no copyright record, and no trade paper of the era. Its source is Mel Blanc, telling the story of the character's development in interviews and his autobiography decades later, and animation historians have disputed that the name was ever used at the studio at all. The likeliest seed is a sight gag: in Hare-um Scare-um itself, a newspaper headline on screen reads Happy Hardaway. A joke about the director, filtered through forty years of retelling, appears to have become the prototype's official-sounding name, and that name then spread through references, fan encyclopedias and documentaries as settled fact. The ledger's position is the same one it took on the counting question: record what the record shows. The record shows an unnamed rabbit, a borrowed possessive that stuck, and a name invented in memory. Happy Rabbit is real as folklore and empty as history, and both of those facts belong in the file.
Where the ledger draws the line
Which leaves the filing question: is the rabbit in those first four boxes Bugs Bunny? The studio says no, and the ledger agrees with the studio's line while keeping the evidence one click away. A Wild Hare is the debut because that is where the design, the voice, the temperament and the catchphrase all arrive at once, and because the name only became truly his after it, with the on-screen christening following in 1941's Elmer's Pet Rabbit. But the four prototypes are not trivia. They are the visible workings of a studio inventing its biggest star in public, one release at a time, and they are the reason the character index needs a dating rule at all. First appearances are like first years everywhere in collecting: the most valuable claim on the page, and the one most worth checking. The rabbit before Bugs has five boxes in the thirties and forties shelves of this ledger. Tick them in order some evening, watch a character assemble himself across two years, and notice the strangest part: the most famous name in animation was on the paperwork before anyone knew who it belonged to.