Reminder that just because you intend to pay your respects to your close friends and colleagues in a piece of art does not mean the final result will be all that great in the end. I can appreciate Chuck Jones making this short as a farewell tribute to Friz Freleng following his passing in 1995, but the sluggish timing, underwhelming slapstick and sub par performance of Frank Gorshin as Yosemite Sam all cause this cartoon to suffer so poorly in the long run.
Having said that, Greg Burson is pretty good as Bugs and the Buttercup Pie sequence by Eric Goldberg is well crafted for what it's going for. Plus, George Daugherty's music score is well orchestrated here, although the H. M. S. Pinafore influence feels out of place and isn't even lampooned enough to gain much momentum from.
As this marked Chuck Jones' final directorial effort shortly before his retirement, it was probably for the better that he stopped making cartoons altogether. Its bad enough that a lot of these cartoons he did during this time were commissioned for the sake of creating cels for publicity purposes, but Chuck's bloated ego had gotten to a point where he had fundamentally missed what made the short films he and his colleagues created work so well to begin with. The comedic timing was no longer zany enough to warrant much enthusiasm, too much dialogue was favored over actual jokes, the characters of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam had long since run dry and this short did not do anything unique with them to justify its existence, and despite some great artistry onboard, Jones' style had gotten stale and uninteresting by this point.
Nobody can really determine what Friz Freleng would have thought of this short had he lived long enough to see it in existence. That being said, while this short was a nice gesture in some degree, there's not much else to really ride home about.
