When I was a kid, Saturday mornings meant cartoons and cartoons meant Bugs Bunny.
Looney Tunes anchored Saturday viewing, with a whole wonderful cast of characters including Daffy Duck, Roadrunner, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian … but the star was Bugs.
Bugs taught me about pop culture, including gangster movies and hillbilly music, and of course, about opera. It was all packaged in humor accessible enough for me but sophisticated enough that my mom watched with me.
In a loving homage to Bugs and review of a recently released DVD set, Dan Berry wrote for the New York Times:
The cartoons, produced for movie audiences by a wildly imaginative, possibly hallucinating team of animators, directors and gag writers at Warner Brothers, were recycled for television with outdated pop-culture references intact. Here, from the mid-1940s, a mention of Bing Crosby’s horse; there, from the late 1940s, an appearance by Humphrey Bogart’s seedy character from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” But these animated scraps from the past demanded that I research their historical context so that I too could be in on the joke.
Check out the WB for a great selection of Bugs Bunny and other classic Looney Tunes if you’d like a little Saturday morning nostalgia.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55G7T8VdWEs&NR=1]