Bugs Bunny was named after a director nicknamed Bugs
The most famous rabbit in cartoons got his name almost by accident. An animator drawing a model sheet for director Ben Hardaway, known around the studio as Bugs, labelled it Bugs's Bunny, meaning Hardaway's rabbit. The studio's publicity team dropped the possessive, and a star was christened.
The character did not arrive fully formed. His first version, in Porky's Hare Hunt from April 1938, was a small white rabbit with a shapeless body and a goofy laugh; according to Friz Freleng, the directors had basically dressed the studio's crazy duck in a rabbit suit, reusing the plot that had introduced Daffy. A 1939 short made him cool and silent, and a later one turned him grey and gave him his first song. As one early comic artist put it, Bugs was the product of five or six directors and many writers pitching gags together.
Designs changed along the way. Animator Charles Thorson, who had drawn a hare for Disney, produced the model sheet that gave the rabbit his name: a pear-shaped, baby-faced bunny with a smart-alec grin. For Tex Avery's A Wild Hare, released on July 27, 1940, Bob Givens made him taller, leaner and more poised, more teenager than infant. That film is regarded as the first true Bugs Bunny cartoon: Mel Blanc's city-slicker voice, Elmer Fudd as the hunter, and the first What's up, Doc? It earned an Oscar nomination.
Robert McKimson and Chuck Jones refined the look further through the 1940s, and by 1942 Bugs was the leading star of the Merrie Melodies series. His breezy confidence suited wartime audiences, and he was given star billing by 1943, as Warner Bros. became America's most profitable cartoon studio. He mocked enemy leaders in propaganda shorts, and one of them introduced his running joke about missing a turn at Albuquerque.
Bugs appeared in more than 160 shorts between 1940 and 1964, has been in more films than any other cartoon character, and became Warner Bros.' official mascot, complete with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Source: Bugs Bunny
