No Parking Hare
| No Parking Hare | |
|---|---|
| Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny) series | |
 Title card | |
| Directed by | Robert McKimson |
| Produced by |
Edward Selzer (uncredited) |
| Story by | Sid Marcus |
| Voices by |
Mel Blanc John T. Smith (uncredited) |
| Music by | Carl Stalling |
| Animation by |
Charles McKimson Phil DeLara Rod Scribner Herman Cohen |
| Studio | Warner Bros. Cartoons |
| Distributed by |
Warner Bros. Pictures The Vitaphone Corporation |
| Release date(s) |
|
| Color process | Technicolor |
| Running time | 6:27 |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | Bugs and Thugs |
| Followed by | Devil May Hare |
No Parking Hare is a 1954 released Warner Bros. Looney Tunes theatrical animated short, starring Bugs Bunny. It was directed by Robert McKimson, and written by Sid Marcus. Similar in plot to Homeless Hare, Bugs finds himself squaring off against a construction worker who wants to build over his hole in the ground.
Plot
Construction is underway for a new freeway. The vibrations wake Bugs and cover him with dirt. Bugs confronts a beefy construction worker (voiced by John T. Smith), and when he realizes that a freeway will be built going through his home, Bugs refuses to move. The construction worker tries to blow up Bugs' burrow, but only succeeds in creating a crater with a large narrow pillar in the center, with Bugs' home still intact ("I hear ya knockin', but ya can't come in!")
The construction worker continues to try to get Bugs out using a rock cutting saw, a bomb dropped from a helicopter, a 60 ton weight dropped from a construction crane, and a stick of dynamite dropped from some scaffolding, but Bugs always manages to outwit the worker. Finally the worker tries to pour a large amount of concrete on top of the hole, but when it dries, he finds out that Bugs has diverted the concrete around his hole with an umbrella, reinforcing the pillar, and defiantly placed a door and mailbox on top. A shot of a local newspaper is shown, with a picture of Bugs on the front page, and a headline that reads "CITY REACHES COMPROMISE WITH RABBIT!!", followed by a scene that reveals that the freeway is ultimately abruptly diverted around the hole, in literally a half-circle. Bugs pops out of his hole to declare: "The sanctity of the American home must be presoived (preserved)!". This quote is from an attorney's argument in an 'alienation of affection' lawsuit involving a couple of the last name Kellogg in 1935 (Chicago Tribune archives).
Edited versions
- When this cartoon aired on ABC, the six attempts by the construction worker to get back at Bugs were reduced to three, with the following scenes cut:
- While Bugs reads The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, the construction worker tries to saw through Bugs' dwelling and ends up getting zapped with electricity when his circular saw hits a fuse box.
- While Bugs sings "There Ain't No Place Like A Hole In The Ground", the construction worker is flies over the hole with a helicopter, and drops a bomb into the hole. As Bugs rises from his bed to turn the page of sheet music, the worker gets blown up after the bomb bounces back into the helicopter off Bugs' bed.
- The construction worker builds a scaffolding made of pipes, climbs to the top of Bugs' hole with a stick of dynamite, and tries to light it, only to be beaten by Bugs, who blows a match through the pipes that detonates the dynamite stick and sends the scaffolding (and the construction worker) crashing down.
- The CBS airing of this cartoon left the Poe-reading and "Hole in the Ground" sequences intact, but edited the scaffolding scene to remove the construction worker holding the dynamite, the construction worker trying to light the dynamite, Bugs blowing the match through the pipes to ignite it, and the resulting explosion. The edited version makes it seem that the scaffolding fell because of its slipshod construction.