The Unprovoked Years

The modern rule is so well known that most viewers assume it was a law of nature: Bugs Bunny never starts it. He is minding his business, somebody shoves a shotgun in his hole or signs him up for a bullfight, and only then does the heckling begin, which is why the audience is always on his side. The ledger says the rule had a start date. For roughly the first four years of the character's existence, all of them under producer Leon Schlesinger, whose studio made these cartoons until Warner bought him out in 1944, Bugs started it constantly. He heckled the innocent, robbed the countryside, lost races through his own arrogance, and was, on several documented occasions, simply the villain. This file is about the brat years: who let him off the leash, the rule that ended it, and the strange, tidy way the unprovoked Bugs and the Schlesinger name exit the record in the same reel.

The rap sheet

Start with the cartoons where the record itself describes Bugs as the aggressor. In Elmer's Pet Rabbit, the 1941 short that was first to put his name on a title card, the rabbit wearing the new name is not the cool customer of A Wild Hare at all but a cocky, ungenerous, nearly thuggish throwback to the prototype, tormenting a man whose only offense was purchasing him. In Wabbit Twouble, Bob Clampett's first Bugs cartoon later the same year, Bugs spends seven minutes ruining Elmer's camping vacation, and the provocation on file is that Elmer pitched a tent in territory Bugs considered his. The crime was proximity. The Wacky Wabbit, in 1942, drops even that pretense: the record describes Bugs pestering a desert prospector with no apparent provocation whatsoever, and as late as 1944's Hare Ribbin' he was still picking a fight with a dog who had merely wandered into the same cartoon. None of this was an accident of one director. The units each ran their own Bugs in those years, and several of them were plainly running the early screwball playbook, the one built for the original lunatic Daffy, with a rabbit swapped into it. Before Bugs traced how long it took the body and the name to settle; this is the companion fact. The personality took even longer.

The rule

The fix was editorial, it has an author, and the author was Chuck Jones. The principle, as Jones framed it across his career, is that an unprovoked heckler is just a bully, and nobody roots for a bully: Bugs must be provoked, every time, so that everything he does afterward is justice instead of cruelty. The account that circulates, sourced to a studio-history retrospective, dates the rule's adoption to 1942, immediately after The Wacky Wabbit, and the filmography lines up with it: Hold the Lion, Please, released that year, stands in the record as the first Bugs cartoon produced under the rule, and it is also, not coincidentally, the first Jones short to use the true A Wild Hare characterization rather than his earlier, meaner variant. Jones spent the rest of his life as the doctrine's loudest enforcer, and he was not sentimental about the early material he was correcting: one drawing reproduced in his biographies shows Bugs recoiling in horror at a picture of his own 1939 prototype from Hare-um Scare-um. The man who codified the character regarded the early character as something to be survived.

The losing years

There is a second habit the mature Bugs does not have that the Schlesinger-era Bugs had in abundance: losing. The record shows only four antagonists who ever defeated Bugs outright across the entire filmography, and two of the four did it inside this window. Cecil Turtle beat him twice, first in Tex Avery's Tortoise Beats Hare, where Bugs reads the title card, flies into a rage, and gets conned out of ten dollars by a gang of lookalike turtles, and again in 1943's Tortoise Wins by a Hare, where Bugs cheats so hard that the rabbit gangsters he hired end up beating him instead of his opponent. That second cartoon, incidentally, is where Robert McKimson's definitive redesign of the character debuted, which means the famous look was finalized in a film where the famous personality still did not exist: the body was fixed before the soul. The other winner was the gremlin of Falling Hare, the wartime short that spends its running time dismantling Bugs entirely. The pattern across all of them is the same flaw, overconfidence, written into the character as a weakness in the years before invincibility was written in as a law. The early units thought Bugs was funnier when he could be humiliated. The doctrine that followed decided he was more valuable when he could not.

The villain leaves with the producer

The purest specimen in the whole file is the last one. In Buckaroo Bugs, released August 26, 1944, Bugs is not a trickster or a heel or an aggressor with a thin excuse. He is the villain of the picture, in so many words: the Masked Marauder, a notorious outlaw robbing the San Fernando Valley of its carrot crop and humiliating the hapless cowboy sent to bring him in, and he ends the cartoon unrepentant and unpunished. And here the ledger produces one of those alignments it exists to notice, because Buckaroo Bugs stands in the record as the last cartoon to carry Leon Schlesinger's producer credit, the studio having been sold to Warner Bros. that summer. The producer under whom the brat was born took his name off the door, and the fully villainous Bugs never appeared again. Nobody planned that symmetry. The record keeps it anyway, and the short itself eventually surfaced for collectors in the Golden Collection era that The Golden Window documented, filed exactly where it belongs: as an artifact of a character who no longer behaves that way.

What the ledger does with a personality

The register's interest in all this is not moral. It is chronological, because behavior turns out to be a dating instrument as reliable as a title card. Show a collector thirty seconds of a Bugs cartoon with no credits attached, a situation the Blue Ribbon program made distressingly common, and the rabbit's conduct narrows the date before the animation style does. A thuggish Bugs wearing his own name card is 1941. An unprovoked tormentor is 1941 to 1942. An arrogant loser is 1941 to 1943. An outright outlaw is 1944. A rabbit who visibly waits to be wronged before the first carrot crunch is after the rule, which is to say essentially everything the general public remembers. The checklist counts all of them equally, because the ledger does not grade character, it records it, and the brat years are as much a part of the 1,002 as the masterpieces. But the note belongs beside the tick: the nicest star in animation history was an editorial decision, the decision has an approximate date, and for four years under Leon Schlesinger the most beloved character the studio ever produced was, on the screen and in the record, the bully.