Looney Tunes for the Holidays

When I was a kid, there were a couple Looney Tunes programs I enjoyed watching on TV around Christmas time. In December 2016, I did a top ten list of Christmas TV episodes, ranking the Looney Tunes short Gift Wrapped at #4, and the following year, I reviewed Bugs Bunny’s Looney Christmas Tales. I remember seeing Gift Wrapped as part of The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show re-runs (though rarely airing in December, usually at random throughout the year) but didn’t see either of them again for a long time until I found a used VHS tape of Looney Christmas Tales at a pawn shop and got the Looney Tunes Golden Collection on DVD. I was surprised to discover that for all the Looney Tunes shorts produced between the 1930s and 1960s (over a thousand!) there aren’t many that capture the spirit of Christmas or are even set during the winter months.

For this holiday season, I’m reviewing five different Looney Tunes shorts that all have something to do with either Christmas or winter. If you’re looking for seasonal cartoon material, look no further—all of these theatrical shorts are available somewhere, either on DVD or streaming or online—and they are especially worth watching if you need some laughs this holiday season!

 

What’s Brewin’, Bruin? (1948)

The Three Bears are barricaded in their cave for winter hibernation, but these are not quite the same three bears from the familiar fairy tale. Mama Bear is pretty chill and doesn’t say much, but she’s also proficient at playing cards (thanks to her son, Junyer Bear, peeking at Papa Bear’s cards) and doesn’t hesitate to grab a shotgun when she thinks there’s an intruder in the cave. Junyer is, well, how can I put this? He does not sound the brightest. He’s also five times the height of his diminutive father, whose height matches his temper; Papa’s ready to smack Junyer upside the head anytime he interrupts his attempts at sleeping.

The domestic violence is pretty gratuitous, even for a cartoon about anthropomorphic bears, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t also downright hilarious at times. The whole thing plays like a mini sitcom, with familiar familial situations that escalate in absurdity and intensity, but also with some classic Looney Tunes cartoon logic. The rigged card game is a very funny gag to start with, and while it’s not consistently laugh-out-loud throughout, there are enough clever jokes made out of simple situations to make it worth your time. Despite the mean-spiritedness of Papa Bear and the questionable implications of Junyer’s cognitive abilities, it holds up pretty well as a winter-set cartoon with some worthwhile laughs and clever inclusions of woodland winter tropes.

 

Daffy Duck Hunt (1949)

Here’s an interesting combination of characters: Porky Pig is out duck hunting, and tries to shoot Daffy out of the sky, but he can’t, because Daffy is too cunning (yeah, it’s one where he’s not being a total goof or getting slighted by another character at every turn) so Porky enlists the help of Barnyard Dawg. No, that’s not a typo, that’s actually how to spell the character’s name, but Barnyard Dawg is usually in conflict with Foghorn Leghorn on the farm—and weirder yet, his voice in this short sounds more like Foghorn’s than the usual Dawg voice. This is a pretty funny one, especially once Daffy agrees to make it look like Dawg caught him and Porky tosses him in his sub-zero freezer. It doesn’t turn to Christmas until the last minute when Daffy disguises himself as Santa Claus and gets the other two to sing Jingle Bells, only for Porky to realize it’s April. Though it’s light on holiday content, it’s worth including just for how funny the final gag is.

 

Frigid Hare (1949)

This short is problematic for its racist depiction and use of the term “Eskimo” for the Inuit hunter trying to catch a penguin, and I could say it’s pretty good if you can just ignore that part, but honestly, I can’t just ignore that and give it a recommendation. Yes, admittedly, the opening is amusing, with Bugs mistakenly thinking he’s made it to Miami beach for vacation, there are some cute, funny moments when Bugs is interacting with the penguin, but having an Inuit hunter and a penguin together in the first place is an anachronism because they are, quite literally, polar opposites in real life, and when Bugs decides to defend the little guy from the big bad hunter, the “Eskimo” becomes the focal point. While not every bit with him is harmful, the character design is just not acceptable.

I’m not criticizing the cartoon because of this—like the disclaimers say, these are products of their time, and I can accept them on those terms—but in terms of cartoons I would recommend watching with intention, I wouldn’t really include this one if all you want is some wholesome entertainment. A different short I would recommend with less racism (though still a little, it’s hard to fully escape it sometimes) and the same supporting character (later known as Playboy Penguin) alongside Bugs Bunny once again is 8 Ball Bunny (1950), which only ends in Antarctica and is otherwise not much of a winter-themed short, but is more of a classic, in my opinion.

 

The Abominable Snow Rabbit (1961)

I watched this one many times as a kid and would quote it often, especially the titular creature (known as Hugo), with his big blue nose and shaggy hair covering his eyes. Daffy is rattled when Bugs gets them lost in the Himalayas on their way to Palm Springs, and he’s even more rattled when Hugo mistakes him for a bunny rabbit because he’s tied his shirt around his head and the sleeves are flopping around like ears. Hugo says “Just what I always wanted! My own little bunny rabbit! I shall name him George, and I shall pet him and squeeze him!” Daffy’s initial reaction is an all-timer, and the back and forth of Bugs and Daffy trying to evade the big guy’s smothering love sustains the short to the point that you wish it was longer. The story is solid, and it never gets dull or repetitive, just funnier. It has an amusing twist at the end, too: they discover Hugo was an actual snowman when he melts! I highly recommend this short; of all the snowy-themed non-Christmas Looney Tunes shorts, this one is at the top of the list for funniest. 

 

The Iceman Ducketh (1964)

This one is from an era when Looney Tunes cartoons still looked mostly the same as they did throughout the previous decade, but upon closer inspection, you start to notice the animation quality isn’t quite as good as it once was. The Mel Blanc voices sound virtually identical, but visually, there’s something just a little off. Daffy Duck is hunting Bugs Bunny in the frigid Klondike, taking on the role most commonly filled by Elmer Fudd. Just like Elmer, Daffy is repeatedly thwarted by Bugs in rapid-fire gags that are not among the best for this type of premise, but they’re still pretty funny.

This short is most famous for the inexplicably memed moment when Bugs scoops water out of a lake and says “I saw a guy do this in a toothpaste ad once. Ta-da!” and dumps the water out, only for it to freeze before Daffy crashes into it with a fantastic smashing sound effect and instantaneous stunned expression. The funniest part to me, though, is when Daffy is blown up with a stick of dynamite and says, “I think I’m going to cry.” One peculiar aspect of the ending is it seems to imply Bugs Bunny hibernates through the winter (like one of the bears snoozing under the tree Daffy is trapped in, freezing his tail feathers off, as “That’s All Folks!” is scrawled over the end title card) even though hibernating is atypical for rabbits—but then again, what Bugs Bunny behaviour is ever typical rabbit behaviour?

 

There are more shorts that could fit into a winter-themed compilation like this, so maybe one day I’ll do another installment, but for now, I hope you find some classic cartoons to watch for this holiday season and have a Merry Christmas!

 

Top 10 Christmas TV Episodes:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2016/12/top-10-christmas-tv-episodes-ccc-issue.html

Bug Bunny’s Looney Christmas Tales:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/12/bug-bunnys-looney-christmas-tales-1979.html

Toy Story (1995): Favourite Films Series

Toy Story (1995): Favourite Films Series

 

There is a very good chance the original Toy Story was one of the first movies I ever watched that I actually comprehended as a movie-watching experience. It wasn’t my first movie, but it was among my first movies, and as a kid, I loved it, just like, well, pretty much every kid I knew. I won a Woody toy as a prize for one of the first colouring contests I ever entered, I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas when I was five, and I always wanted to play with the big Rex at preschool, complete with roars and quotes from the movie. There was something intuitive about the synergy of playing with toys which came alive with my imagination that also came directly from a movie where the toys were actually alive, yet weren’t real, but felt real in spite of their animated forms. I never gave any thought initially as to why the toys in Toy Story looked a little different than all the other animated movies I grew up loving—at least, not until I was a bit older and seeing the newest Pixar animated film in the theatre became standard practice.

It's hard not to talk about the subsequent Pixar films when explaining why the very first one they released is still among my all-time favourites, but as Pixar came up with ever more original and entertaining tales of anthropomorphic insects, fish, and monsters, I never completely forgot about Toy Story. I didn’t like Toy Story 2 nearly as much, and by the time Ratatouille came out in 2007, I was starting to feel a little too old for animated kids’ movies—not definitely too old, just a little uncertain if I still liked them as much. I passed on WALL-E and Up when they first came out (only to see them later when I was more grown up and regret it in retrospect), but when Toy Story 3 was announced, a unique opportunity presented itself: the chance to see both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 back-to-back in theatres, re-released in Real D 3D! This was in 2009, so I was fifteen. I was in high school, but my best friend and I decided we weren’t too cool to see a childhood favourite again after a very long time, and in a new way we had never seen it before. So, we went, and had no regrets.

I will never forget both of us remarking afterward how the part with Sid’s duck toy swinging straight toward the screen as it tries to ring the doorbell made it worth the 3D experience alone. The 3D hype at the time was just beginning; Avatar was only a couple months away, and animated films seemed to lend well to the gimmick. Beyond just the immersive return to a world of talking toys, I discovered in that rewatch with my more developed brain and budding cinema obsession that Toy Story was more than just an animated movie from my childhood. There was something in the screenplay that I had completely missed before: a really good, original story, that couldn’t be told any other way except with computer animation. I would later study the screenplay in a university course on scriptwriting, and make further discoveries about just how good the writing was. Is it still the best Pixar movie of them all? Maybe not in all ways, but I’ll explain why it’s still one of my favourites, and a unique benchmark that is unlikely to be surpassed ever again.

Before I get too far long, I’ll conclude my anecdotes of rediscovering Toy Story. After our nostalgic double feature in 2009, my best friend and I decided we had to see Toy Story 3 as soon as it came out in 3D, and we were a bit apprehensive when we went into the movie theatre in the summer of 2010, only to discover dozens of crying children with their struggling families. Had we made a mistake by coming to this sequel for little kids? Our worries soon went away as the third film took us on an unexpectedly emotional journey and, by some miracle, made us care even more about the original because of how good the conclusion to the trilogy was (oh how I wish it had stayed that way!) and how it was really more of a story for us, the ones who had outgrown our toys somewhere in the recent past, around the time we started to think we were too cool to see Pixar movies in the theatre.

That Christmas, I got the Toy Story trilogy on Blu-ray in an epic collector’s box shaped like Andy’s toybox, and over the years, I rewatched all of them a few times, finding the third one held up as a heartfelt ending, and the second one…well, I still don’t really like the second, but it’s fine, I guess. The first movie, though? Obviously, the animation is not as good, but even for all its plastic textures and the sometimes-disconcerting expressions of some of the toys, the animation isn’t horribly dated, in my opinion—certainly not to the point that it’s hard to watch. The animation at the time was astounding, but even now that the novelty of its status as the first feature length computer animated film has worn off, it still holds up, because there is so much greatness beyond just the medium in which the story is told.

Toy Story is still really, really funny. It hits that sweet spot of packing in humour kids will find amusing (but adults won’t be annoyed by) and slipping in some lines and visuals adults will laugh at, but kids won’t notice or won’t get. What works in its favour is handing so many memorable jokes, bits, and lines to a variety of colourful characters that all look and sound totally unique. I would argue that Toy Story has one of the best voice casts of any animated film, computer generated or otherwise. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen sound like they are acting on stage together at points, their back and forth as Woody and Buzz respectively is so convincing. Some of my favourite lines now come from Buzz, and they completely went over my head when all I could process as a kid were the fast-moving images and exciting (though sometimes sad/contemplative/quirky) music by Randy Newman. Buzz trying to fix his spaceship (the box he came in) and asking for a “bonding strip” (piece of tape) is exemplary of something simple but crucial to what makes Toy Story work so well: the delusion of this toy not knowing how he really fits into this world.

I’m a big fan of adventure movies, and Toy Story is a great example of one. We spend relatively little time in Andy’s room seeing the normal lives of the toys before Buzz enters the fray, and within a half hour Buzz and Woody are at the Pizza Planet (side note, I absolutely loved realizing as an adult that the kid is playing a whack-a-mole-like game but with chest bursters from Alien!) then it’s not long before they are in the clutches of Sid: a perfect villain for the story, because he is the classic archetype of the kid we all knew growing up who was, for whatever reason, incredibly destructive and unhinged. The comeuppance he gets when the toys get him back at the end before Woody and Buzz’s final pursuit of the moving truck is just so satisfying, in addition to being a little bit horrific. The way the aged animation works best now, I think, is how it makes Sid and his mutant toys look even more uncannily creepy. Last note on the ending: Buzz finally accepting he can’t fly (it’s just “falling with style”—it’s all just so darn quotable!) as they are gliding after the moving van to ensure they make it to Andy’s new house is one of the most thrilling and satisfying animated finales I’ve ever seen.

Toy Story is one of very few movies from my childhood that were always intended for a family audience with kids particularly in mind that holds up as an enduring, lifelong favourite. Even though it is dated compared to the majority of Pixar films, what will never go out of date are the lovable characters, their impeccable comedic antics, and a story that balances heart, humour, and adventure. They’ll probably keep making Toy Story sequels until I’m as old as Geri, and after the third one, I think it’s clear none of them will be able to replicate how special the first one was, is, and always will be.

Oh, who is Geri, you ask? He’s the old man playing Chess with himself in the 1997 Pixar short Geri’s Game who later appears as “The Cleaner” in Toy Story 2!