Bugs Bunny Was Created Because Animators Got Lazy

It's not controversial to say that Bugs Bunny is funnier than every other comedian working today, and he's not even real. You would think that he was the product of careful deliberation by a whole team of brilliant creative minds -- and he was. The Bugs Bunny that we know today was developed over the course of years by several artists at Warner Bros. Studios in the "Golden Age of Animation," but he only appeared in his first cartoon because they got lazy.

Maybe that's not fair. Animators are hardworking people whose jobs aren't easy, and they especially weren't in 1938, when you still had to draw with feathers dipped in coal miners' sweat or whatever. Still, the first Warner Bros. cartoon that featured the bunny who would later become Bugs, Porky's Hare Hunt ...

... was a blatant rip-off of a previous cartoon called Porky's Duck Hunt, which happened to be the first appearance of Daffy Duck. 

Hoping to replicate the success of Porky's Duck Hunt and maybe not wanting to come up with a whole new cartoon, they just replaced the duck with a rabbit -- or, as animator Friz Freleng put it, "dress the duck in a rabbit suit," which we generally don't recommend. Did you know ducks have teeth (sort of)? We do. Now.

Audiences didn't notice because audiences in 1938 didn't notice anything, and the cartoon was so successful that they decided to develop the rabbit character more fully. "Bugs Bunny" made his official debut two years later, and he's been stinkerin' up screens big and small ever since.

Manna is not nearly as funny as Bugs Bunny on Twitter, but she does rhyme less there.

Top image: Warner Bros.