Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid
From Eccentric Flower
Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid
1942
Summary: A hapless vulture attempts to catch Bugs for dinner.
Director: Bob Clampett
Writer: Warren Foster
Featuring: Bugs Bunny.
Onreel
0:22 Sound cue under titles and opening scene yet to be identified, if any.
1:06 Sound cue: A very slow "Arkansas Traveler." Beaky then sings along while he's flying.
2:38 When Bugs pops up as the traffic controller with the radar antenna across his ears, the three chimes are the old NBC radio network identification notes (the first audio trademark ever granted in the US). These were very familiar to audiences at the time.
2:40 A B-19 was a bomber aircraft (a famous boondoggle which was obsolete before it was completed). Later in the same year Bugs would make another B-19 joke.
3:12 Sound cue: Beaky will now sing his own lyrics to "Blues In the Night." Somewhere in here that music gets merged with "Arkansas Traveler."
3:59 Now Bugs is singing to "Blues in the Night" in the shower.
4:18 Despite the lipstick and the behavior, I think the shower cap is not sufficient to permit a true Bugs in Drag score.
4:33 IMDb tells me that this noise is produced on a trombone somehow!
4:40 Sound cue: For everyone who has ever wondered what this piece of circus music is, it is "Over the Waves (Sobre las Olas)" by Juventino Rosas. Now you know. It also invokes ice skating, which, based on Bugs' movements in this sequence, is surely why it was used here.
4:48 And now we combine it with "Arkansas Traveller." Works pretty well!
5:34 The ribs make a xylophone noise.
5:47 "Gruesome, isn't it?"
6:23 Sound cue: IMDb lists this cue as "Long Long Ago," but it strikes me as much more like "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," which made its first appearance the same year as this cartoon in Private Buckaroo. However, it doesn't totally match either. This might have been deliberate obfuscation, for example if Warner wanted to invoke "Apple Tree" but didn't have the rights to use it (Private Buckaroo was a Universal film, "Long Long Ago" was public domain). The very last bars of the music (just before Bugs begins to spin the vulture) are more like "Long Long Ago," but the rhythm is much more like "Apple Tree." On balance I am calling this "Long Long Ago."
Offreel
The title of this cartoon is a reference to "getting the bird" (in Bugs' Brooklynese), meaning a rude gesture (or noise) as well as literally getting the bird. I hadn't been aware that that phrase was in use as early as 1942.
Sara Berner is the voice of Mama Buzzard.
Beaky Buzzard
Beaky (who in this cartoon is called "Killer," probably ironically) was a Bob Clampett creation who appeared in two Clampett cartoons (the second, The Bashful Buzzard, is a near-clone of this one) and was used later in one cartoon each from Friz Freleng and Bob McKimson. The list of four is in the Lost and Found.
Wikipedia notes: "Warner Bros. apparently thought they had something in the character, and Beaky was featured in much of the Looney Tunes merchandising of the time." Obviously they later correctly concluded they were mistaken. Beaky is possibly the least interesting of the many mostly-uninteresting characters featured on the "we felt we should have at least one cartoon for each of these second-string characters" disc of the Golden Collection. (Set 1, disc 3)
Beaky's voice, as well as his manner, is modeled on Edgar Bergen's Mortimer Snerd character, and Beaky's in-house name was "Snerd Bird" initially. His voice was done by Kent Rogers in the first cartoon, but Rogers died in a military training accident before he could finish the work for the second; from then on Mel Blanc did his voice.
