Ballot Box Bunny

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.

Usually I am not a huge fan of the Looney Tunes cartoons where Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam are partnered together, as they almost always end up in a pretty mediocre string of slapstick jokes. Here, there were still slapstick jokes, but, for me, they seemed to be funnier and there seemed to be a secret personality let out from Yosemite Sam in this episode that I had not seen before (I do not want to give spoilers, but basically how he feels about partnership). Also, some of the slapstick gags included were ones that (according to reviewers on IMDb) have been repeated several times, I had not seen before, so I found them almost delightful to watch. (The piano one was one of them.) The theme of the episode was also quite entertaining. If there was one thing I did not like about this episode, it was that almost all of the jokes end up with dynamite going off or guns being fired. Pretty dull.

In this episode, we first see Yosemite Sam trying to place himself in the title of mayor, by convincing the townspeople to respect him. As he strings out a rather irrelevant list of things he will do for them, Sam tells the people he will eradicate every rabbit. Duh, Bugs Bunny is listening nearby - and of course -, he does his best to fight against Sam and become mayor. Cartoon capers commence...

I do not want you to go away thinking that I really like this episode, it is not one of my very favourites. It is one of my favourites which includes Bugs and Sam.

I recommend this to people who like all Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny jokes and for Looney Tunes fans in general. Enjoy "Ballot Box Bunny"! :-)

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

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?