Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/Water Water Every Hare
From Eccentric Flower
Water, Water Every Hare
1950
Summary: Bugs ends up in the castle of an evil scientist who needs his brain. It was all a dream - wasn't it?
Director: Chuck Jones
Writer: Michael Maltese
Featuring: Bugs Bunny.
Onreel
0:20 Sound cue: Stalling's "What's Up, Doc?" theme.
0:36 Sound cue during the rainstorm: Chopin's "Prelude No. 15 in D-flat Major."
0:56 Sound cue while showing Bugs sleeping underwater: "Brahms' Lullaby."
1:25 Sound cue when Bugs drinks the water: The first four notes of "How Dry I Am." Then back to Brahms.
1:36 The lullaby startles and switches into a minor key as the mattress lifts, then grows increasingly sinister as we approach the castle.
3:50 Sound cue throughout the hair styling: "The Wish That I Wish Tonight."
4:16 The monster is spreading open the bobby pins with his teeth before handing them to Bugs - very helpful of him.
4:29 The way the dynamite is wired together is meant to look like a permanent wave machine:
5:41 "I quit too!" I suppose some day it will need to be explained that the XXX denoted a bottle of whiskey.
5:55 This joke has been rendered obsolete by Rogaine.
6:14 Ether (in this case diethyl ether), it may one day also need to be explained, was one of the first relatively safe surgical anaesthetics. (Its use largely replaced chloroform because the threshold between an anaesthetic dose of chloroform and a toxic one is fairly small.) A mild dose of ether, as shown here, tends to make one light-headed and more than a little loopy, and in fact has been used as a recreational drug. Ether is still occasionally used for both purposes, but fell out of favor in both cases because there are safer and less flammable ways of doing the same things.
6:18 Sound cue: Stalling underscores the point by playing the overture from "William Tell" very slowly.
Offreel
The title, of course, is a joke on the "water, water everywhere" phrase from Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
This cartoon bears many similarities to Hair-Raising Hare. In that one, which was earlier, the monster did not have a name. Here the evil scientist calls him Rudolph. Later, Chuck Jones would name him Gossamer, which is how he is known to fans today.
The evil scientist, who is supposed to sound like Vincent Price, is John T. Smith doing his Price imitation. Smith tended to get the sort of voice parts which today would be voiced by Maurice LaMarche, the voice of the Brain in "Pinky and the Brain," among many other things.
