La Gran Dormida

If you thought that Bob Clampett had gone as far out of normalcy as possible with "Porky in Wackyland" and "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", then check out "The Big Snooze". When Elmer Fudd - tired of always Bugs Bunny always embarrassing him - tears up his Warner Bros. contract, Bugs does something that I wouldn't even imagine him (of all people) doing: he invades Elmer's dreams, creating one of the most surreal sequences that I've ever witnessed. Who would have ever guessed that Bugs Bunny was Freddy Krueger's forebear?!

Above all, it's a good thing that I first saw this cartoon now, when I'm old enough to fully understand what it portrays (not to mention that I know who Bette Davis was). Had I watched this when I was six or somewhere thereabouts, I would have naively laughed at it without realizing what the gist was; or it might have scared me. As Looney Tunes screenwriter Michael Maltese said in an interview: "We wrote cartoons for grownups, that was the secret."

But overall, this is a really cool cartoon. Bob Clampett, during the approximately one decade that he worked with the Termite Terrace crowd, created a body of work beyond what I could have ever conceived of. I recommend it.