The Big Snooze

Quite some time back, I bought a TCM Cary Grant box set. Recently, looking for some shorts to watch, I decided to see what was included as extras in this particular set and saw a lot on the DVD of Night and Day. (I should probably first point out, however, that in this box set, all the DVDs are on one spindle, which is a bugaboo of mine.) There were a lot of extras on that particular disc.

First up were some trailes to Cole Porter movies, and just for fun I watched the trailer to Broadway Melody of 1940, which coincidentally was on a couple of days ago. The interesting thing about the trailer is that it didn't use any dialogue, just scenes from the movie with music and text superimposed. There was a short called Musical Movieland that looked like it might be recycling clips, and a search of IMDb pointed out that indeed it was. I didn't watch the short of Desi Arnaz, and was most interested in the cartoon, The Big Snooze.

Obviously taking its name from the movie The Big Sleep, this is another Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon. Bugs runs through a hollow log and Elmer chases him, setting up a running joke of Bug rotating the log so that Elmer comes out the other side off the edge of a cliff. Eventually Elmer gets so fed up with this that he rips up his contract with Warner Bros. to retire to a life of fishing. Poor Bugs wants Elmer to think of him; what job will he have without Elmer? (Yosemite Sam had actually made his debut a year before The Big Snooze, so Bugs had him to harass.)

Bugs finds Elmer sleeping under a tree, so Bugs takes a sleeping pill in order to enter Elmer's dream and turn it into a nightmare, making Elmer reconsider retirement. It's a bizarre nightmare that has, among other things, Elmer dressed as a femme fatale. On the whole, however, I found this particular short a lot of fun. From what I could tell on IMDb, it did get a release on one of the collections of Looney Tunes shorts in addition to showing up here.