Elmer Fudd
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Elmer Fudd
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| First appearance | Elmer's Candid Camera (1940) |
| Created by | Chuck Jones |
| Voiced by | Arthur Q. Bryan (until 1959) Mel Blanc (1959 - 1989) Billy West (1991 - present) |
| Background Information | |
| Aliases | Egghead |
| Friends | Elmyra Duff (student) |
| Rivals | Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck , Happy Rabbit |
| Catch phrases | "Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I'm hunting wabbits, heheheheheheh." |
The fictional cartoon character Elmer J. Fudd, now one of the most famous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters, also has one of the more convoluted and disputed origins in the Warner Brothers cartoon pantheon (second only to Bugs Bunny himself). His aim is to shoot Bugs, but usually ends up seriously injuring himself.
His stock line is: "Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I'm hunting wabbits, heheheheheheh," although he does not say this in every cartoon in which he appeared.
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[edit] Egghead
In 1937, Tex Avery introduced a new character in his cartoon short Egghead Rides Again. Egghead had a bulbous nose, funny/eccentric clothing, a voice like Joe Penner, and an egg-shaped head. Many cartoon historians believe that Egghead evolved into Elmer over a period of a couple of years.
Egghead made his second appearance in 1937's Little Red Walking Hood and then in 1938 teamed with Warner Brothers' newest cartoon star Daffy Duck in Daffy Duck and Egghead. Egghead continued to appear in a string of cartoons in 1938: The Isle of Pingo Pongo, Cinderella Meets Fella, and A-Lad-In Bagdad. However, it wasn't until A Feud There Was (1938) where his character was identified as "Elmer Fudd, Peacemaker", though he still maintained his Egghead-ish appearance.
Egghead (or the prototypical Elmer Fudd) made four more appearances in Johnny Smith and Poker-Huntas (1938), Hamateur Night (1939), A Day At The Zoo (1939), and forty-nine years later in the 1988 compilation film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters.
In the 1939 cartoon Dangerous Dan McFoo, a new voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan was hired to provide the voice of the hero dog-character and it was in this cartoon that the popular "milk-sop" voice of Elmer Fudd was created.
[edit] Elmer emerges
In 1940, Egghead/Elmer's appearance was refined giving him a chin and a less bulbous nose (although still wearing Egghead's style of clothing) and Arthur Q. Bryan's "Dan McFoo" voice in what most people consider Elmer Fudd's first true appearance: a Chuck Jones short entitled Elmer's Candid Camera. Happy Rabbit drives Elmer insane. Later that year, in Bugs Bunny's debut cartoon A Wild Hare, Bugs appears, with a carrot, Brooklyn/Bronx accent, and "What's Up, Doc" all in place for the first time. Elmer has a better voice and a trimmer figure, too.
Elmer's role in these two films, that of would-be hunter, dupe and foil for Bugs, would remain his main role forever after, and although Bugs Bunny was called upon to outwit many more worthy opponents, Elmer somehow remained Bugs' classic nemesis, despite (or because of) his legendary gullibility, small size, short temper, and shorter attention span. Somehow knowing not only that Elmer would lose, but knowing how he would lose, made the confrontation, counterintuitively, more delicious. Despite being the antagonist, Elmer lacked the malice of a true villain.
Elmer was usually cast as a hapless big-game hunter, armed with a double-barreled shotgun and creeping through the woods "hunting wabbits." In a few cartoons, though, he assumed a completely different persona — a wealthy industrialist type, occupying a luxurious penthouse, or, in one episode involving a role reversal, a sanitarium — which Bugs would of course somehow find his way into. He appears in the video game Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time as the boss of the era Stone Age and in Bugs Bunny and Taz: Time Busters as the boss in the Vikings era.
[edit] Fat Elmer
For a short time in the early 1940s, Elmer's appearance was modified again. He became a heavy-set, beer-belly character, patterned after Arthur Q. Bryan's real-life appearance, and still chasing Bugs (or vice versa). Audiences did not accept a fat Fudd, so ultimately the slimmer version (which was only fat in the head, literally and figuratively) returned for good.
This time period also saw a temporary change in Elmer's relationship with Bugs Bunny. Instead of being the hunter, Elmer was the victim of unprovoked pestering by Bugs. In Wabbit Twouble, Bugs plays a number of gags on Elmer, advising the audience, "I do dis kind o' stuff to him all t'rough da picture!" Another episode, The Wacky Wabbit, finds Elmer focused on prospecting for gold which would be used to fund the World War II effort. Elmer sings "V for Victory" to the tune of "Oh! Susanna", with Bugs joining in just before starting to hassle Elmer.
[edit] Later Appearances
Elmer would also appear frequently on the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures as a teacher at Acme Looniversity, where he was the idol and favorite teacher of Elmyra Duff, the slightly deranged animal lover who resembles Elmer both in basic head design and lack of intellect. Elmer also had a cameo in Histeria! as Gutzon Borglum.
Contrary to his earlier appearances, Elmer took on a more villainous role in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which he is a secret agent for the Acme Corporation. In his scene, Elmer chases Bugs and Daffy through the paintings in the Louvre museum, taking on the different art styles as they do so. At the end, Elmer forgets to change back to his normal style after jumping out of the pointillism painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, allowing Bugs to easily disintegrate Elmer by blowing a fan at him. An even more villainous Elmer appeared in two episodes of Duck Dodgers as The Mother Fudd, an alien who would spread a disease that caused all affected by it to stand around laughing like Elmer.
[edit] The voice of Elmer Fudd
Fudd was originally voiced by radio actor Arthur Q. Bryan, but after Bryan's death in 1959 the voice was reluctantly assumed by the versatile Mel Blanc (although other voice actors have alternated as Fudd's voice). Bryan's characterization remains the definitive one. He was never credited onscreen, because Blanc had a clause in his contract that required a screen credit. Blanc admitted in his autobiography that he found the voice difficult to get "right", and he never quite made it his own. In Speechless, the famous print issued following Blanc's death, Elmer is not shown among the characters bowing their heads in tribute to Blanc. Elmer has also been voiced by Hal Smith, Daws Butler, Greg Burson, Jeff Bergman, Billy West and others over the years.
The best known Elmer Fudd cartoons include Chuck Jones' masterpiece What's Opera, Doc? (one of the few times Fudd succeeded in besting Bugs, and he feels bad about it), the Rossini parody Rabbit of Seville, and the "Hunter Trilogy" of "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" shorts (Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!) with Fudd himself, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck.
He nearly always misplaced r and l with w (a trait that also characterized Tweety Bird) when he would talk in his slightly raspy voice. That characterization seemed to fit his somewhat timid and childlike persona. Naturally, the writers often gave him lines filled with those letters, such as doing Shakespeare's Romeo as "Soft, what wight thwough yonduh window bweaks!" or Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as "Kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit...!" or "The Beautifuw Bwue Danube, by Johann Stwauss".
Part of the joke is that Elmer is presumably incapable of pronouncing his own first name correctly.
Elmer's easily mimicked voice lends itself to endless takeoffs. In recent times, Robin Williams has parodied Elmer doing Bruce Springsteen's song "Fire": "I'm dwivin' in my cah / I tuwn on the wadio ... 'Cause when we ki-i-i-iss / FIWE!" or as Marlon Brando's character in A Streetcar Named Desire saying "Stewwa!" During a stand-up performance, Gilbert Gottfried once performed a parody with Elmer in a scene from Apocalypse Now: "Da howaww...da howaaww."
Google allows you to change the active language to Elmer Fudd in the options. [1]
Occasionally Elmer would properly pronounce an r or l sound, depending on whether or not it was vital for the audience to understand what the word was. (For example, in 1944's The Old Gray Hare, he clearly pronounces the r in the word "picture")
[edit] Notes
- A preserved World War II B-17 Flying Fortress Bomber carries the name "Fuddy Duddy", with Elmer painted on the side.
- In Marvel Comics, a foe of Howard the Duck is named Judge Elmer Dwedd, and appears as a mixture of Elmer and comic-book character Judge Dredd.
[edit] Trivia
- In Rabbit Fire, Fudd states that he is actually a vegetarian; he only hunts for the sport of it. However, in later and prior cartoons, he hunts animals for their meat.
- Paul Dickson's book, Dickson's Word Treasury (ISBN 0-471-55168-6) quotes the Oxford English Dictionary as saying that "fud" is "the proper term for a rabbit's anus."
- When United States Vice President Dick Cheney, himself rotund and bald, accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington while hunting quail, countless parodies arose on the Internet drawing parallels between Vice President Cheney and Elmer Fudd.
- In Confederate Honey (1940), there is an Elmer-esque character named Ned Cutler.
- Actor/director Mel Gibson is known for his accurate Elmer Fudd impersonation. In fact, as a practical joke on the set of Braveheart, he directed several scenes in Elmer Fudd's voice, causing several actors to break character and burst out laughing at various points.
- In an episode of Seinfeld ("The Bubble Boy"), Jerry is dating a woman who laughs like "Elmer Fudd sitting on a juicer", which turns Jerry off.
- Elmer Fudd makes a cameo appearance in the Family Guy movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, in a cut-away where he actually kills Bugs by shooting him in the chest and then snapping his neck. He also appears in Drawn Together's episode Gay Bash.
- Elmer appears in an episode of the Adult Swim show "Robot Chicken", under the pseudonym "Elmer Phudd", where he engages in a rap battle with "B-Rabbit" (Bugs Bunny) in a parody of 8-Mile.
- In Gex: Enter The Gecko a character heavily based on Elmer Fudd appears in a forest area of the first Toon Tv level Out of Toon where Gex appears dressed as a rabbit, he is bald with a bulbous head and just like Fudd he has very small eyes, he is dressed in a gray and brown hunting aparrel very similar to what Fudd wears and carries a double-barreled shotgun, he shoots Gex at first sight. After Gex defeats two of this characters he gets rewarded with a red controller. Before entering the area where he appears there is sign that reads "Wabbit Season Open" a reference to Elmer's infamous phrase. they appear again to fight Gex in a duck costume.
- Elmer is spoofed in an episode of Reboot entitled "Between a Raccoon and a Hard Place". Enzo reboots as a Fuddesque hunter dressed in Elmer's standard hunting gear, with bulbous head and speech impediment. Enzo hunts Rocky the Rabid Raccoon, who seems to be a cross between Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner and a raccoon. Enzo even tells another character to be 'Vewy Vewy Quiet, we're hunting Waccoons.'
- On an episode of Frasier, Niles appears dressed for fishing in ridiculously exaggerated outdoor gear. Frasier remarks that he looks like "a skinny Elmer Fudd."
[edit] External links
- Elmer Fudd downloadable movie
- Elmer now has his own version of Google
- Fresh Hare and Corny Concerto Two Classic Public Domain Elmer Fudd Cartoons (Free to Download)
