Friday Funnies: Bugs Bunny Show Theme Song



Overture! 

I have declared January Looney Tunes month for Friday Funnies. Over the next five Fridays I'll be sharing some of my favourite Looney Tunes moments, starting with the above clip, which is the theme song for The Bugs Bunny Show. There are better quality clips, shared below, but this is the one that I remember from my own childhood. Throughout my childhood, The Bugs Bunny Show would air at 5pm on Channel 9 and became staple viewing. Bugs and Daffy would introduce the show with this theme song and we were treated to three different shorts, each featuring different Looney Tunes characters. In the 1990s, they tampered with the format at bit. From mid-1990 to 1992, the show changed to an hour long format, leading in to the (then) top rating Channel 9 news. This version of the Bugs Bunny Show was also hosted by Australian actor Sophie Lee (Muriel's Wedding, The Castle,) who caused a stir for her racy outfits. (I also remember at some point, my nine year old self, writing her a fan letter as I thought she was cool because of the Looney Tunes association.) Other Warner Brothers cartoons, such as Ghostbusters and Tiny Toons found themselves piggybacked into the show and all in all, it made for a great hour of kids entertainment. Eventually Channel 9 gave it the axe, because well, Channel 9 are weird like that, in favour of a long forgotten Australian soap called Paradise Beach that starred Isla Fisher. (You can watch part of the final episode of the Bugs Bunny Show here.) The Bugs Bunny Show was relegated to part of the Saturday morning line-up on What's Up Doc, which featured other Warner Brothers cartoons, before dying a quiet death. 

In the United States, The Bugs Bunny Show was often changed and rebranded to suit different generations and the popularity of different characters, with its longest running format being the Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. The opening credits are different, yet spookily familiar and would change a couple of times:





Comments

Kate said…
I have not heard of any of these but am glad you enjoyed them! Old follower : )

MY FF and int giveaway
4 January 2014 at 01:57
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more