Bully for Bugs

Synopsis

On his way to the Coachella Valley for the "big carrot festival, therein," Bugs Bunny gets lost, and wanders into a bullring in the middle of a bullfight between Toro the Bull and a very scared matador. Bugs looks at his map and famously declares: "I knew I shoulda taken that left toin at Albukoikee". As he asks the matador for directions, the matador escapes into the stands, leaving Bugs to fend for himself against Toro. After irritating Bugs and getting a slap for "steaming up his tail," Toro chalks up the points of his horns like a pool cue and rams the rabbit out of the bullring. As he sails into the air, a furious Bugs decides to exact revenge and says his famous line: "Of course you realize this means war".

Toro takes his applause for claiming his latest victim (and pushes a bead across a scoring wire, as in billiards), but it is short-lived because Bugs re-enters the bullring in matador garb. Bugs defeats Toro using an anvil hidden behind his cape. While Toro is still dazed from his collision, Bugs makes the bull follow the cape up to a bull shield, accompanied by a lively underscore of "La Cucaracha", where his horns pierce it. Bugs bends the horns down like nails and, thinking he's got him at bay, makes fun of Toro using puns ("What a gulli-bull, what a nin-cow-poop"), unaware that the bull can detach his horns and strike back. Toro proceeds to bash Bugs in the head, which knocks him unconscious.

While Toro sharpens his horns, Bugs interrupts him by placing an elastic band around the horns and using it as a giant slingshot to smack him in the face with a boulder. Toro charges back at Bugs, right in the posterior. Bugs then returns, this time wearing a large sombrero doing a little dance and slapping Toro on the face in tempo to the tune of "Las Chiapanecas". Toro tries to punch him twice but is slapped each time. Bugs dances more and then disappears under the sombrero, but not before honking Toro's nose.

While Toro once again sharpens his horns (this time with an angry face), Bugs has prepared a booby trap for the bull, composed of a double-barreled shotgun hidden behind the cape. Toro charges towards the cape, and somehow the shotgun previously in Bugs's hand enters Toro's body and stops at his tail, firing a bullet from one of Toro's horns when he flicks his tail (and the shotgun) on the ground. Taking advantage of that, Toro chases Bugs, shooting at the hare, but Toro eventually runs out of bullets. Toro "reloads" by swallowing several "elephant bullets" (with explosive heads), but when he attempts to test-fire he instead explodes.

Bugs taunts Toro once again by calling him, among other things, an "imbecile" (which Bugs pronounces "embezzle") and an "ultra maroon," but realizes that he is cornered by the bull behind barred gates. Pretending to await certain death (by writing a will and saying his prayers), Bugs opens the gates like a garage door, sending Toro out of the bullring and into the horizon. Toro runs back to the bullring, not anticipating that Bugs has laid out a Rube Goldberg–like contraption of axle grease, a ramp, and some platforms on the bull's path. The grease and ramp send Toro airborne over some glue, a sheet of sandpaper, a protruding matchstick, and a barrel of TNT which explodes when Toro flies by. Still in the air and in shock, Toro finally crashes into a wooden bull shield.

The cartoon ends with the unconscious bull's hindquarters sticking out of the shield, and the victorious Bugs holding up the cape with the words "THE END" etched on it.

Development

In his biography Chuck Amuck Chuck Jones claims that he made this cartoon after producer Eddie Selzer burst into Jones' workspace one day and announced, for no readily apparent reason, that bulls are not funny, and they were not to make a cartoon about them. Since Selzer had, in Jones' opinion, consistently proven himself to be wrong about absolutely everything (having once barred Jones from doing any cartoons featuring Pepé Le Pew, on the grounds that he perceived them as not being funny, which led to Jones and Maltese to do For Scent-imental Reasons, which won an Oscar, which Selzer accepted), the only possible option was to make the cartoon. The sounds of the crowd and the bull are recorded from a genuine bullfighting crowd in Barcelona, Spain. The boulder to the face gag was reused from Rabbit Punch five years earlier, which was also directed by Chuck Jones.

Availability