Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II

For many of us, Richard Wagner’s music entered our consciousness when, in Bugs Bunny’s “What's Opera, Doc?” we heard Elmer Fudd sing “Kill the wabbit, Kill the wabbit” to Ride of the Valkyries. And when Bugs Bunny hears Fudd calling for the death of his kind, he pokes his long-eared head out of a hole, looks at the the camera, and says, with the kind of sadness that is funny because it’s almost real: “Kill the rabbit?” They do not make cartoons like that anymore. Cartoons that bring the highest parts of Western culture right down to the big belly of low culture laughter.