Hare Force (1944)
10/10
One of the Best Bugs Cartoons Ever Made
6 September 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Sylvester the dog(Willoughby the dog with another name, actually) is placidly resting in his warm home in the middle of a snowy town, when poor Bugs is freezing to death outside. The dog's owner, a kind old lady, feels sorry for the rabbit and take him inside. Sly isn't pleased at all by this, and after having some homicidal thoughts, settle to just throw him out. But Bugs wouldn't leave without putting a fight.

Spoilers(After some punches, kicks, tricks, and renditions of ¨As Time Goes By¨ Bugs and Sly become friends, but at poor Grannie's expense!)Spoilers.

This one, along with Little Red Riding Rabbit,Spoilers(that has an ending similar to this one)Spoilers, Buckaroo Bugs, and Hare Ribbin(the uncut version)are my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons, Bugs really is at his greatest on those shorts, and on my humble opinion, at the best of the game when he is kind of a jerk, that was the peak of his career. Later on, he would became progressively nicer, if also more smugly, and those¨excesses¨ended. That was interesting too, at first, on one hand it allowed for more sophisticated humour, but after a while, he became too much like that, and kind of bland as a character, paraphrasing what Robert McKimson said.

I have to admit, however, those shorts I just mentioned are funny because they are unexpected, people didn't saw those endings coming(in Hare Ribbin case, they didn't saw that ending at all), if they were the norm instead of the exception, those shorts wouldn't be that hilarious.

I disagree with the notion of ¨Hare Force¨ being too similar to ¨Kit For Kat¨ Starring Sylvester(the Cat) In that short Sylvester tries to compete with a kitten to be Elmer's pet, trying to make the poor kid look bad. In Hare Force, neither Bugs or the dog care about what Granny think of them, specially at the very end, they just fight and throw the other out of the house instead, so is more straight forward. Also Sylvester(the cat) is (from an objective standpoint) unlikable in that one, he only gets a pass because he is more charismatic than the unnamed kitty, and you know he is gonna lose anyway. Bugs plight is way more sympathetic, until the last scene of course.

I also didn't note Bugs design being any different, maybe it is a subtle redesign I didn't identified.

P.D.: In the original Latin American dub of this cartoon, they changed the name of the dog to ¨Fido¨ to avoid confusion with the more famous Sylvester, the cat. Sylvester cartoons from the 50s were dubbed before the a.a.p. package of 30s and 40s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, like this one, got dubbed, I think. They also called the cat Sylvester, in the dub of the short ¨Tweetie Pie¨, instead of calling him Thomas as in the English version, because they thought the American voice actress committed a mistake. The new dub is adamant in being as close as the English dialogue and names(and speech impediments, even if they can't be adapted) as possible(except when they thought it would be funny to make late 90s references, yuck!) but I think that is a mistake because it robs the cartoons of having its own identity on the Spanish speaking countries besides, the new dub is really unfunny, unlike the old that was great. I would be very thankful if someone show me where I can found ¨Hare Force¨ with the old Latin American Spanish dub. Please. My email is genormicoidelkjh@gmail.com. Thanks for you attention!
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