‘It Happened One Night’: The movie that directly inspired Bugs Bunny
A history-making romantic comedy hailing from one of the greatest directors of all time and an iconic animated rabbit don’t have very much common at first glance, but Bugs Bunny was born directly from a seminal black-and-white masterpiece.
Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night finds the central pairing as a rebellious reporter and a runaway heiress, who end up falling for each other when the bus they’re both on leaves them behind at one of its stops, with a string of misadventures forcing them directly into each other’s arms.
Helmed by the legendary Frank Capra, It Happened One Night became the first film in history to snag the ‘Big Five’ at the Academy Awards after taking home ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, a feat that’s only been replicated twice more in the last 90 years by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.
One huge fan of the movie was animator Friz Freleng, who played a key role in the creation of Bugs Bunny. While the anthropomorphised rabbit had technically debuted beforehand, it was Tex Avery’s 1940 short A Wild Hare that marked Bugs’ first appearance in the form that would make him famous, complete with Mel Blanc’s first utterance of “What’s up, doc?” and an Oscar win for ‘Best Animated Short’.
Thanks to Gable’s charismatic performance and some of the idiosyncrasies he placed into his character, the influence of It Happened One Night on Bugs Bunny is plain for all to see. In one scene, the star’s Peter Warne snacks on a carrot while delivering motor-mouthed dialogue with a roguish charm, something that would become a key part of the cartoon rabbit’s appeal.
Beyond that, It Happened One Night also features Gable’s Warne making up a person called Bugs Dooley at one point to frighten off Roscoe Karns’ Oscar Shapely, while he himself is even called ‘Doc’ into the bargain. That’s not to say the on-screen inspiration was simply lifted wholesale to serve as Bugs’ one and only influence, but the Gable effect is nonetheless there for all to see.
There were a myriad of creators, cartoonists, writers, and studio heads involved in putting together the pieces that would eventually evolve into the erstwhile face, frontman, and figurehead of the Looney Tunes, but none of them have proven to be quite so pronounced as It Happened One Night.
Suffice to say, when Capra was overseeing his classic rom-com, he couldn’t have had any idea that in addition to its own status as one of the greatest films ever made, he’d also lend an inadvertent assist to a two-dimensional icon that would become famous in his own right and known the world over less than a decade later.
