What's Opera Doc

A tribute to the Bugs Bunny Cartoon 'Whats Opera Doc' from the Toronto Star. Which makes the same point I did here in tribute to Chuck Jones. And see my post at the Carnival of Anarchy on Bugs the anarchist drag queen.

Elmer Fudd, left, and Bugs Bunny in a scene from Warner Bros.' What's Opera, Doc?

At any other time, the film would not have been made. Imagine the pitch: "Let's steal time and funding from our other projects so we can go way over budget making a cartoon with no jokes, and no real gags. The score will be a German opera. Kids won't get it. Most adults won't get it, but I don't care because I think it's funny."

Fortunately, the time was 1956, the director was Chuck Jones, and the place was the Warners Bros. backlot animation studio dubbed "Termite Terrace." The result – released 50 years ago this week – was "What's Opera, Doc?," voted by animators in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals to be the greatest cartoon of all time.

It is the antithesis of the routine cartoon. In place of snappy one-liners we see Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny singing their parts with complete sincerity and commitment. The backgrounds are beautifully textured paintings. The score is powerful and moving. Bugs cuts a striking figure in a metallic brassiere before Madonna was even born. It's audacious and decadent and beautiful and bold and everything the vast majority of cartoons would never dare to be.

Thanks to Bugs and folks like Chuck Jones we got a classical education on TV. Classical as in music, and opera. Masses of folks from the Forties through the Seventies, experienced these cartoons on the big screen and then on the little screen and were introduced to Wagner, Rossini, Verdi, Mozart etc.

The fact that all these composers were the popular music of their day gets forgotten by those who would make classical music some form of 'long haired' intellectual haute culture. Thanks to Bugs and his creators we came to see and hear the music in a pop culture format.

Which is just a sneaky way to promote the fact that this week we are discussing libertarian education on the Carnival of Anarchy.






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R. Cobb

R.Cobb was a cartoonist for the LA Free Press in the sixties and seventies. He went on to do the design work on Alien. I always liked this cartoon. Ironic that it is as relevant today as it was back during the Viet Nam war era.



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Holy Kryptonite Superman

It makes sense that a Canadian should discover Kryptonite, since it is Superman's nemesis and Superman was a Canadian invention.

And it further makes sense it should be discovered in Siberia, an allegorical frozen land just like where Superman hid his Fortress of Solitude.

And maybe the meteor from Krypton was the one that crashed into Tunguska, Siberia in 1908.

Siberian mineral spells trouble for Superman

Their findings confirmed Stanley's view that the mineral -- determined to be sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide -- was new to science, and the team prepared a paper for the European Journal of Mineralogy to report the discovery. The researchers conducted standard searches in the scientific literature to make sure nothing had been previously published about such a mineral composition. Then Stanley -- whom Le Page describes as a particularly meticulous scientist "who likes to check everything" -- did a final Internet search using Google to make sure nothing had been missed.

"And guess what came out?" a chuckling Le Page told CanWest News Service on Tuesday.

Stanley found nothing to suggest other scientists had beaten his team to the punch. But the web search did produce a match with a Wikipedia site about kryptonite, the pretend stuff Superman's enemies -- particularly the diabolical Lex Luthor -- like to use against the world's original caped crusader.

Usually depicted in comics and films as a green, glass-like shard of rock, kryptonite can quickly turn Superman into a grimacing, helpless weakling.

"Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula -- sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide -- and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film Superman Returns," Stanley said in a statement released Tuesday by the Natural History Museum.

"The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite."

See:

Comics

Comic Books

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Smurfs are Commies

A Marxist deconstruction of the Smurfs by a non-marxist. LOL.

"In summary, I would contend that the Smurfs, a comic strip created at the height of the cold war in a social democratic country in Europe, featuring communitarian lessons and an unsympathetic characterization of those who "lust for gold", does in fact hold up as a piece of Soviet Nonconformist art, expressing the principals of Marxist Communism succinctly, compellingly, and in a manner that children can understand, making it the perfect teaching tool for your children, should you want to raise Communist children for some reason."


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