The best Looney Tunes shorts/adaptations are the ones that realize: Bugs Bunny isn’t an agent of chaos. Daffy Duck? Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner? Scrappy Doo? All wake up every single day wondering just how much chaos they can unleash in the world. Bugs doesn’t. He doesn’t instigate the chaos. The environment instiages the chaos. Bugs reacts to the chaos. And it’s hilarious:
Bugs didn’t just wake up one day and randomly decide that he was going to ruin some guy’s opera by impersonating legendary composer, Leopold Anthony Stokowski. Bugs was just going about his day (albeit very loudly) when the opera singer instigated the chaos:
And then Bugs decided to impersonate legendary composer, Leopold Anthony Stokowski! Because of course he did!
Bugs Bunny is, in an ironic twist, the “straight man” of Looney Tunes. He’s the one who’s just minding his own business until random things happen to him. The difference between Bugs and someone like Eddie Valiant is that even though Bugs doesn’t instigate the chaos, he 100%, unabashedly, embraces it. And taps into it. And escalates it. And it’s hilarious:
As he says in the last panel:
“I don’t ask questions; I just have fun.”
(Also, for the record, that’s why Elmer Fudd is his best rival: Both of them are reactors to the chaos, so they’ll both unabashedly escalate things. That’s how you go from gun -> bigger gun -> cannon -> bigger cannon -> proposal -> marriage.)
