User reviews

Bowery Bugs is a thoroughly enjoyable Looney Tunes cartoon, without it being the best. The music is as usual energetic and quirky, the sight gags are clever, the pacing is brisk and the dialogue a vast majority of the time is hilarious("that's you fathead"). The best part of Bowery Bugs though is the animation, it is brilliant with the colours especially impressive. Bugs is still rascally, arrogant yet likable, while Brodie is a good adversary who takes Bug's wisecracks well. And then there is the voice work from Mel Blanc and Billy Bletcher, which is nothing short of superb, then again that didn't surprise me as such as the voice work is always good in the Looney Tunes cartoons. Overall, hugely enjoyable and excellent cartoon, making the most of a slightly unexceptional story. 9/10 Bethany Cox

To paraphrase what kev keefe has already observed in his comment, Art Davis's one Bugs Bunny cartoon is funnier than all of Bob McKimson's Bugs cartoons combined. It was one of the worst errors in judgment on the part of the people running Warner Brothers that, when the 50s started and they could no longer afford four animation units, they dissolved Davis's unit instead of McKimson's.

"Bowery Bugs" was one of the last cartoons Davis directed for Warners, and it shows that he was just starting to hit his stride. This cartoon is both hilarious and beautifully crafted. It's a darkly funny re-telling of a New York City urban folk tale about Steve Brody, an Irish roughneck whose run of bad luck led him to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in the late 19th Century. In this version, Bugs Bunny gets involved after Brody threatens him, thinking a rabbit's foot will bring him good luck. Quick-thinking as ever, Bugs talks Brody out of it and sends him on a wild ride of deeper and deeper misfortune, with Bugs using his disguise abilities to pose as everyone from a Middle Eastern fortune-teller to a gambler to a lady to a baker to a gruff Irish cop. The suicidal implications (although in real life, Brody survived his jump) would make a cartoon like this impossible to get made these days, and that's a sad sign of how much this nation has lost its sense of humor.

Mel Blanc is in his usual fine form as Bugs, but a special mention must be made of the uncredited voice performance of Billy Bletcher as Brody. Bletcher is one of the unsung heroes of cartoons from the early-to-mid 20th Century, the voice behind countless ruffians with deep, loud, raspy voices, including Papa Bear from Chuck Jones's Three Bears cartoons from Warners and Peg-Leg Pete a.k.a. Black Pete for Disney cartoons.

The cartoon is filled with wonderful details, from Bugs narrating over imitation woodcuts, to a bouncer who's nickname is Gorilla because he really IS a gorilla, to a little puppy who licks Brody's face out of sympathy, but then acts disgusted. And overlying the cartoon is native New Yorker Davis's sincere but sardonic affection for his gritty hometown.

Davis never again directed a cartoon this good, but if he had been able to continue directing for Warners, I think he would have rivaled Chuck Jones as the studio's best cartoon director of the 50s. As reality turned out, Davis spent the 50s demoted to an animator for Friz Freleng's unit, but at least his final Warners' credit was as a director, for 1961's "Quackodile Tears." That one's nothing special, but it's good by Warners' early 60s standards. In the late 60s, Davis joined De Patie-Freleng as a director and made a couple of the best Pink Panther cartoons, "In the Pink of the Night" and "Pinkcome Tax", but "Bowery Bugs" will always be his finest achievement.

I think that I'd heard of Steve Brody before I'd seen Arthur Davis's "Bowery Bugs", but I wish to call this cartoon the coolest way to know him. The plot has Brody suffering a bout of bad luck, so he decides to find himself a rabbit's foot. While we should immediately be able to guess which rabbit he tries to get it from, we still haven't seen what Bugs Bunny makes the poor sucker do! It goes to show that Bugs was a New Yorker all the way.

Truth be told, what Bugs does to the guy towards the end reminds me of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", how Kevin McCarthy's character starts finding that everyone has been taken over by the aliens and doesn't know whether or not he can trust anyone. But that's just me.

While I have to admit that Arthur Davis is not the Warner animation director who first comes to my mind, he did helm some fairly interesting cartoons during his few years as a director: "Mexican Joyride", "The Stupor Salesman" and "Porky Chops" are the ones that I know aside from this one. All in all, this is one that you're sure to like.