Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/Frigid Hare
From Eccentric Flower
Frigid Hare
1948
Summary: Bugs rescues a penguin who develops an unwanted attachment to him.
Director: Chuck Jones
Writer: Michael Maltese
Featuring: Bugs Bunny.
Onreel
0:20 Sound cue under the titles: "Winter." (This is one of the more unusual renditions of this piece, which is used as a cue whenever there is snow, skiing, et cetera).
1:26 You may not be able to tell, but Bugs is wearing a very old-fashioned men's bathing suit - which, as the back tells us, was borrowed/rented from the Coney Island bathhouses (back when they lent out bathing suits) and never returned. It's notable that, at least in Boston, it was possible to borrow/rent a bathing suit from a public facility as late as the World War II years - although the suits themselves had not been updated in style for some decades and were therefore more akin to the baggy full-body model Bugs is wearing here.
1:42 "Hey, ya big palooka!"
1:54 "He went dat way, Nanook." Although it is apparently a legitimate Inuit word, Bugs was surely - as most viewers of the time would be - thinking of Nanook of the North.
2:01 Sound cue: "Old Miami Beach" is apparently a Carl Stalling original.
2:07 Sound cue: "There's Music In the Land." Used a couple more times, including at the end of the cartoon.
2:30 "Mr. Warner gave me just two weeks' vacation." Unlike Disney characters, Warner characters never made much of a secret about the fact that they were performers in a cartoon.
2:35 "I'll send you a momentum from Miami!" Bugs means "memento."
2:56 Sound cue: "My Buddy."
3:59 Sound cue: "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," accompanying one of my favorite Bugs-in-drag moments ever.
4:34 "Simply tres chic," but Bugs' French needs work as usual.
4:50 Sound cue during the chase sequence: "Coasting."
6:17 "What an Eskimo pie-head!" Eskimo Pie. Despite the fact that this confection is still, as far as I know, unabashedly sold under this name, this line has caused controversy among the squeamish. See Offreel.
7:05 Bugs says "up here," even though dialogue at the beginning indicates he is at the South Pole. (We won't discuss the fact that Inuit are in the Arctic, and not Antarctic, region. There has never been indigenous human life in Antarctica.)
7:13 "... till July 1953." See Offreel.
7:23 Bugs and the penguin walk off with the Southern Lights (or are those the Northern Lights?) in the background.
Offreel
This cartoon's appearance on the Golden Collection is probably the first time it's been seen wholly uncut since the 1970's, when people began to be concerned about correctness in depictions of the native peoples of the Arctic. The depiction of the Eskimo is a little too much for some folks. Even when the cartoon has been shown on television in recent years, the "Eskimo pie-head" line has been cut, even though there is very clearly such a thing as an "Eskimo Pie" and the debate continues about whether the word "Eskimo" is pejorative. (There is no good collective term which encompasses both Inuit/Inupiat and Yupik peoples, which is the main reason "Eskimo" continues to be legitimate in Alaska, but not in Canada which only has Inuit.)
The other line in this cartoon which has caused trouble over the years has done so for an unexpected (and ridiculous) reason. Bugs' calculation (in 1948) that he won't have to go back to work until July 1953 has been either redubbed (to put the date into the future again) or cut outright (to not date the cartoon) in many showings.
