A m e l a n c h o l y l o o k a t t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n o f B u g s B u n n y
![[The Soul Of A Toon]](jordan961115.gif)
By MILO MILES
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Cartoon stars never age, but there's a price to be paid for their immortality: they can die and yet live on. It's easy to decide when Bugs Bunny was born — the moment in Tex Avery's 1940 short "A Wild Hare" when the wascally wabbit pops out of his hole and asks Elmer Fudd "What's up, Doc?" Although someone sort of like Bugs had starred in a few previous cartoons, at that instant the character began to define cool, and became Bugs Bunny. Harder to tell when this Bugs died — he slowly faded away in commercials and merchandising. The end of the old Warner Bros. Animation Department in the '60s, and the retirement of the master artists who shaped his adventures in the '40s and '50s were parts of the decline. The 1989 death of Bugs' voice, Mel Blanc, may have been the final blow. Blanc's son did Bugs for a while, but in "Space Jam" even he's been replaced by Billy West (heard as Stimpy, and Ren in the crappy episodes, of Nickelodeon's "Ren and Stimpy"). Hanging out on screen with Michael Jordan isn't exactly the problem, either. There's no implied rehabilitation of Jordan, the greatest all-around basketball player ever and a rather saintly sports hero by today's standards. The one outrageous casting mistake is that there's no slot for Dennis Rodman, who's half-toon already. In comparison, Bugs and Michael seem to be merely equal members of the new, ubiquitous Celebocracy, though it's the human who needs the 'toon's showbiz prowess. Bugs was a media star back in World War II, when the NBA didn't even exist. He's still an amazingly durable draw. With so much history behind a persona, expansion is hard, exploitation easy. Bugs runs through a gag repertoire several decades old, mechanically inserted into new situations and still just amusing enough. There's no denying that — as with revamped Warners shows like TV's "Tiny Toon Adventures" — much of the slapstick wit is either trapped in the past or hopelessly self-conscious. Michael and the Warner Toons' opponents, the alien MonStars, even look like variants on the Beast from Disney's recent "Beauty and the Beast." The one new 'toon in "Space Jam," Lola Bunny, is all right for a cartoon of a feminist jock, but somehow she's a less vivid woman character than Bugs used to be when he got in drag. Animated actors designed for seven-minute shorts — and this includes everyone from Mickey Mouse to Beavis and Butt-Head — have trouble sustaining interest at feature length. The climactic game in "Space Jam" goes slack repeatedly. By contrast, the best of Bugs' former battles didn't have time to waste on anything less than slam dunks. Finally, Bugs will forever feel like a born loner, rather than a team player, to me: he deliberately used to take on whole gangs of bad guys by himself. The Looney Tunes veteran in "Space Jam" who remains almost untouched by time is even older than Bugs — namely, Daffy Duck. Over the years, he's appeared in more cartoons than Bugs, and his crafty mania coupled with unrepentant outsider status now looks prophetic. As has been pointed out before, Daffy was always black. Indeed, "Space Jam" could make its most profound impact if it was juxtaposed with the outrageous, utterly guileless stereotypes of Warners' most notorious cartoon, 1943's "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs." Perhaps that Bob Clampett coon-humor short should be paired with "Space Jam" on video in the "Grown-Ups' Special Deluxe Social Commentary Edition." It may be tough to fully update Bugs Bunny, but the changes in America over his lifetime speak for themselves. |