Fifteen cartoons dating from World War II give Volume 6 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection more focus than previous sets. Many of the 1940's cartoons remain very funny. Bugs Bunny dresses up as Brunnhilda and rides in to the strains of "Tannhauserr" in d"Herr Meets Haren" (1945), a gag Chuck Jones re-used to greater effect in s"What's Opera, Docn" a dozen years later. In D"Russian Rhapsody
Bugs Bunny is a fictional main character who starred in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated films produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions, which became Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1944.[1] Bugs starred in 163 shorts during the Golden Age of American animation, and made cameos in three others along with a few appearances in non-animated films. He is an anthropomorphic hare or rabbit.
Bugs became more popular during World War II because of his free and easy attitude, and began receiving special star billing in his cartoons by 1943. By that time Warner Bros. had become the most profitable cartoon studio in the United States. In company with cartoon studios such as Disney and Famous Studios, Warners put its characters against the period's biggest enemies, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and the Japanese. The 1944 short Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips features Bugs at odds with a group of Japanese soldiers. This cartoon has since been pulled from distribution due to its racial stereotypes. He also faces off against Herman Goering and Hitler in Herr Meets Hare, which introduced his well-known reference to Albuquerque as he mistakenly winds up in the Black Forest of 'Joimany' instead of Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Bugs Bunny short Knighty Knight Bugs (1958), in which a medieval Bugs Bunny trades blows with Yosemite Sam and his fire-breathing dragon (which has a cold), won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) of 1958. Three of Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny shorts—Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!—comprise what is often referred to as the Duck Season/Rabbit Season trilogy, and are considered among the director's best works.[citation needed] Jones' 1957 classic, What's Opera, Doc?, cast Bugs and Elmer in a parody of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It has been deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, the first cartoon short to receive this honor.
