Homeless Hare

I don't think I've done a post on a short, much less an animated short, in a while. So recently, I popped one of the many DVDs from Warner Home Video into the DVR to see what shorts were on it, and wound up watching the short Homeless Hare.

As you might have guessed from the title, the story revolves around Bugs Bunny, living once again in one of his rabbit holes. This time, we only see the hole part of his home, as an urban construction worker operating an excavator digs up Bugs' home one morning. Bugs wakes up to find the bottom of his home is no more, and this just won't do. So as you might guess, Bugs decides to make the excavator operator's life a living hell.

Homeless Hare has a lot of the typical gags you'd expect in a Looney Tunes cartoon, with a relative minimum of dialog. What I found interesting about it, however, was the two humans in the cartoon. The excavator operator is the villain of the piece, and shows up for most of the short, usually getting the short end of the stick, so to speak. But there's one other scene with a worker smoothing out cement with a trowel. I can't recall seeing either of these humans in another Looney Tunes short, and neither of them is drawn anything like the other humans in the shorts. The excavator guy (in the left-aligned photo) is rather more top-heavy than any other Looney Tunes human, for example.

The cigar-chomping cement guy (having taken the cigar from the excavator operator), on the other hand, reminds me of some character actor, although I can't recall which one. Not that a guy smoothing cement would be smoking a cigar like that; I'd guess the ashes would wind up in the cement which would be undesirable. But you don't expect reality in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Finally, I noticed that the directing credit is given to "Charles M. Jones". That is of course Chuck Jones, and I guess I never really paid attention to the opening credits since IMDb claims he was credited as "Charles M. Jones" for almost 15 years, up until 1955. I always thought the credits read "Chuck Jones".