Bugs para Alcalde

Hilarious Bugs Bunny short that takes a poke at politics. It's directed by Friz Freleng with a story by Warren Foster. Yosemite Sam is running for mayor on an anti-rabbit campaign. Bugs hears this and decides to enter the race to oppose Sam. One laugh after another with great lines and gags. Very nice animation with well-drawn characters and backgrounds. Wonderful Technicolor is always a plus. Excellent voice work from the incomparable Mel Blanc. He does some of his best Yosemite Sam work here. Energetic music from Carl Stalling. My favorite bits were the cee-gar bit and the Emma joke. Oh and that ending is classic. A great Bugs & Yosemite Sam cartoon that is sure to please most fans.

Bugs Bunny chooses to run against Yosemite Sam for mayor, after Sam runs on a platform of exterminating all the rabbits and two rabbits in every pot. Of course Bugs doesn't wan't to share his pot with anyone. So he sets off to win the election. Like real politics dirty tricks abound. Most of them quite humorous. The funniest being the classic piano gag. But at the end it's all for naught as a dark horse candidate wins. This funny cartoon is on Disk 1 of the "Loony Tunes Golden Collection Volume 1" I'm happy that the Russian roulette gag is here at the end, as whenever the short is on Cartoon Network it's omitted.

My Grade: A

Yosemite Sam runs for Mayor and builds himself as Honest Sam. He is running on an anti-rabbit platform. Bugs Bunny hears this and decides to fight fire with fire.

This is a simple Bugs vs Yosemite Sam in an election fight. There are some very good gags. Theodore Roosevelt is a great bit and it offers terrific violence. Kissing babies is an obvious one and Bugs gets to dress up. The cigar bit is a little off topic. I have never seen people hand out cigars for an election. Maybe they could do something else like the candidates' buttons or balloons filled with gas. The picnic and ants are a solid gag. Again, it may not be directly on target, but it is adjacent. The piano gag is a classic which does get often recycled. I don't mind repeating it if it is comedy greatness. I really like the "Dark Horse" resolution. The Russian Roulette is rather dark, but darkness is part of the Looney Tunes legacy.

Friz Freleng's 'Ballot Box Bunny' was one of my favourite cartoons as a child and watching it today it's easy to see why it appealed to my anarchic young mind. Barely a minute goes by without some kind of explosion, be it from a joke cigar, a cannon, a stick of dynamite or a booby trapped piano. The premise of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam running against each other in the Mayoral elections is just an excuse for these various time-honoured routines. The most famous gag, used again and again in cartoons, is the piano with the booby trapped key which sets off some TNT. This old joke takes so long to tell that it always bores me nowadays unless it is timed impeccable. In 'Ballot Box Bunny' it is performed in a pretty uninteresting manner. There's a few other slip ups in timing throughout this cartoon, most noticeably the ludicrously late spit-take Bugs does at the beginning of the short. Despite relying on safe, predictable jokes for the most part, 'Ballot Box Bunny' is a fast paced cartoon which manages to avoid being dull despite the audience being one step ahead of every scene in Warren Foster's script. The plus side of this is that it makes the brilliant, slightly macabre ending all the more unexpected and funny.

Even fifty years later this short holds up as a terrific commentary on life in America. Here's Yosimite Sam, running for mayor on a platform that promises to exterminate rabbits. "Two rabbits in every pot." Bugs hears this and needs to run against him to save his own skin.

Sound familiar?