Homeless Hare (1950)

The Worst Film Ever

Simply A Masterpiece

Fantastic!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

. . . and "Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel" (both children's picture books by Virginia Burton), Bugs Bunny finds his town hole threatened by a construction foreman. After four minutes of back and forth (in which Bugs generally prevails), an amusing sequence begins with Warner Bros.' favorite rabbit getting "Girdered." This leads to the dazed hare flirting with disaster high above the city, not unlike the BABY'S DAY OUT film and story. When a bucket of rain water saves the day, Bugs uses a red hot bolt to combine THE PRICE IS RIGHT's "Plinko Game" with a Rube Goldberg-like mechanical sequence to gain the upper hand in his fight to preserve his home. In nearly every American city today you can find evidence is the older parts of town of similar victories won by the "little guy" against the building sprawl of Big Interests. There are no such zoning anomalies in the newer sections of the city, ever since the Greedy Fat Cats invented the legal theft concept of "Eminent Domain."

Revenge is the story, here, but one can hardly blame Bugs Bunny for extracting it. You see, Bugs was at home minding his own business when a big construction crane came down and dug out Bugs and his home. They were digging to presumably put up another big high-rise in the middle of the city.Anyway, Bugs pleads with the crane operator to put he and his home back in the ground. The worker - a real tough-looking and tough-sounding thug - talks sweetly agrees - but then dumps Bugs to the ground and pours a pile of bricks on top of him, laughing sadistically as he does it.Bugs throws a brick back at him with a telegram attached. The message says, "Okay, Hercules, you asked for it. Signed, Bugs Bunny." (The top of the telegram, by the way, reads "Eastern Onion.")Bugs then makes life miserable for the construction worker, doing everything imaginable, some of it very funny. The poor man, at one point, is hovering on a teeter-totter 100 floors up, taking his clothes off trying to keep the totter balanced!

A construction worker destroys Bug's home accidentally while doing his job. But seeing as how he's totally unrepentant about what he's done, Bugs decides to take it upon himself to teach him some manners. Definitely one of the lesser of the Bugs cartoons this short just didn't hit my funny bone as much as usual. It IS however one of the very few times I saw Bugs get his ass completely beat down (even if it only kept him out of commission for like half a minute). This animated short can be found on Disk 1 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3.My Grade: B-

This is the first of two cartoons where a thoroughly obnoxious and unlikable construction worker tramples on our stalwart hero, with generally hilarious results (though the construction worker was probably less than happy about it all). The second of the two, No Parking Hare, is slightly better, but both are marvelous and are well worth watching. This one is happily available. Recommended.