‘Baseball Bugs’ at 75: How a Looney Tunes classic wham-bammed America’s pastime
“Baseball Bugs” debuted in movie theaters 75 years ago this month. The 1946 cartoon is so packed with funny gags, clever puns, imaginative imagery and lively music that it’s still recognized as one of the best produced by Looney Tunes. Set in New York, the cartoon also presaged a golden age of baseball that saw the city’s three teams dominate the national pastime.
“It’s one of those cartoons that hits on all cylinders — great story, great comedy, great animation, great art, great art direction, great vocal performance by Bugs Bunny,” said Pete Browngardt, executive producer and director of “Looney Tunes Cartoons” on HBO Max, and the creator and voice of “Uncle Grandpa,” an animated TV show.
“Baseball Bugs,” directed by Friz Freleng, is not just a great title on its face; it’s also a pun from the period that few fans would get today. The term “baseball bugs” used to refer to baseball fanatics — partisans who were so into the sport that they had caught the baseball “bug,” or fever.
The cartoon came out in an era when baseball was unquestionably the most popular sport in the United States, far eclipsing football and basketball. (Today you can watch it on the Internet or HBO Max.)
Bugs Bunny doesn’t make his appearance until the fourth inning of the game, which begins with the hulking Gas-House Gorillas beating up on the emaciated Tea Totallers, a comically overmatched team of decrepit old players.
The Gorillas use a combination of superior skill and unabashed cheating to steamroll the Tea Totallers in the early going. In the fourth inning alone, the Gorillas score 42 runs as dozens of base runners do a conga dance around the diamond. That pads their lead to 96-0, sparking a round of thunderous cheers from the fans at New York’s Polo Grounds.
But soon we hear a lone voice yelling, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” and then see an angry Bugs Bunny, sticking his head out of his hole in the outfield, sporting a straw hat and munching on a carrot inside a hot dog bun.
“Nah, you Gas-House Gorillas are a bunch of dirty players!” Bugs says, in the distinctively brash New York accent of voice actor Mel Blanc. “Why, I could lick them in a ballgame with one hand tied behind my back — all by myself! Yeah. Yeah, I’d get up there and wham! A homer. Wham! Another homer.” Soon, three Gorillas players are menacingly standing over him.
“Alright, bigshot,” one snarls, blowing cigar smoke in Bugs’s face. “So you think you can beat us all by yourself? Well, you got yourself a game.”
The PA announcer announces a “slight change” in the Tea Totaller lineup, with the famous line, “Catching, Bugs Bunny, left field, Bugs Bunny, right field, Bugs Bunny,” until he lists, in an accelerated tempo, Bugs at every position. Meanwhile, we see Bugs on the mound, calmly pulling out a carrot from his back pocket and chewing on it like a wad of tobacco, his tail poking out of a hole in the back of his uniform. After a couple of pitches with an exaggerated windup, he announces, “I think I’ll perplex him with my slowball,” and delivers his famous Bugs Bunny change-up, which floats peacefully past three batters, each of whom strikes out by whiffing three times.
Coincidentally, at the 1946 MLB All-Star Game later that year, Rip Sewell threw perhaps the most famous ever “eephus pitch” — a slow looping pitch that resembled a Bugs Bunny change-up — but he didn’t have as much success that day as Bugs. Ted Williams blasted the pitch into the right-field bullpen for a home run.
According to Paul Dickson’s “The Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” the first use of the term “Bugs Bunny change-up” came a half-century later, in a 1997 Denver Post story, when Rockies catcher Jeff Reed used it to describe Phillies pitcher Mark Portugal’s off-speed pitch. I tracked down Reed, who told me he still remembers it.
“Mark Portugal had a very good change-up — it was one of those pitches that looked like it kind of stopped three-quarters of the way there, then it moved again, and then it stopped — like those old Bugs Bunny cartoons that we used to watch,” Reed said.
Sometimes you’ll hear people talk about a “Bugs Bunny curveball,” which is less accurate since Bugs throws nothing but fastballs and change-ups. In 1996, the late Red Sox pitcher Vaughn Eshelman described his pitch this way to the Boston Herald: “We call it the Bugs Bunny curveball. It’s the one where they swing three times before it even gets (to home plate).”
Less remembered is Bugs’s fastball. Winding up to the same sound effect as the arrival of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character, Bugs throws a heater that not only overmatches the hitter, but also slams Bugs Bunny the catcher several feet into the backstop, momentarily knocking him out.
Even though the Gorillas are nominally named for the Gashouse Gang, the raucous Cardinals teams of the 1930s, they more closely resemble the Murderers’ Row Yankees teams of the 1920s, featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. It’s Bugs Bunny, in fact, who seems to channel Gashouse Gang star pitcher Dizzy Dean, with his cocky persona and homespun personality.
Bugs displays a flashy hitting style that evokes today’s bat-flippers — except Bugs flips his bat before he hits what appears to be home run. But as he comes around to score, a Gorilla is standing with the ball in front of home plate; Bugs distracts him with a pinup poster and trots home to make it 96-1.
In one of the cartoon’s best scenes, a Gorilla yanks the home plate umpire off the field and takes his place. After Bugs Bunny slides into home plate without a tag, the impostor ump calls out Bugs, who crawls up the Gorilla’s chest protector and literally goes nose-to-nose with him, inside his face mask. In an argument President Biden would appreciate, Bugs yells, “Where do you get that malarkey?! I’m safe!”
The two players yell “Safe! Out!” a bunch of times, until Bugs uses his patented switcheroo tactic, throwing off his opponent by yelling “Out!” The Gorilla declares, “I say you’re safe! If you don’t like it you can go to the showers!”
“Okay then, Doc,” Bugs says. “Have it your way. I’m safe.”
Erik Strohl, vice president of exhibitions and collections at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, said the cartoon is an example of how the creative class leaned on America’s pastime.
“Popular culture uses baseball to connect — you see it all the time, whether it’s books, movies, TV, art, or drama,” he said.
“Bugs Bunny is an iconic American hero,” Strohl added. “Everyone loves the idea of Bugs Bunny always being the wily underdog who can do whatever he wants and can win.”
Several other cartoons from this period also featured baseball, including “Porky’s Baseball Broadcast,” which came out in 1940 and, like “Baseball Bugs,” was directed by Freleng. The two cartoons shared some gags — including a “screaming line drive” that features a baseball with a screaming face, and a batboy who flies up to the hitter with batwings.
But as Greg Ford, who produced the 1993 documentary “Freleng Frame By Frame,” said, the earlier cartoon wasn’t nearly as good.
“’Baseball Bugs’ is crisper,” Ford said. “Every frame is nailed.”
Browngardt, of “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” co-wrote a tribute to “Baseball Bugs” that debuted on HBO Max this year called “Pitcher Porky,” where Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, whose team is called the “Cutie Pies,” take on a modern version of the Gas-House Gorillas.
Browngardt said that “Baseball Bugs” made a big impression on him as a child.
“It has those gags that are so iconic — like the screaming baseball, the Conga line around the bases, the Gas-House Gorillas smoking cigars,” he said. Browngardt credits sound designer Treg Brown with filling the cartoon with great audio too, such as the “tugboat” sound as the Gorilla blows smoke in Bugs Bunny’s face.
Last year, the U.S. Postal Service came out with Bugs Bunny stamps to honor the character’s 80th birthday, and Browngardt drew a stamp showing the rabbit in a “Baseball Bugs” pose.
There are some errors in the cartoon. The Gorillas somehow lose a run over the last five innings, and they also switch from the visiting team to the home team, setting the stage for a dramatic bottom of the ninth and perhaps the best cartoon ending ever.
By then, Bugs has taken a 96-95 lead. With a man on base and two out, the announcer says, “A home run now would win the game for the Gorillas.” Upon hearing this, the Gorilla hitter runs out of the batter’s box, chops down a gigantic tree, and lugs it back to home plate for a bat, his cigar dangling from his mouth. Unfazed, Bugs Bunny says, “Watch me paste this pathetic palooka with a powerful paralyzing perfect pachydermous percussion pitch.” But the palooka turns on the percussion pitch, sending it whistling out of the stadium for what looks like a game-winning homer.
Of course, Bugs doesn’t give up. He sprints out of the ballpark, hails a cab and tells the driver, “follow that ball!” — only to find the cabbie is a Gorilla, who laughs and drives Bugs in the opposite direction. So Bugs jumps out, hops on a bus (where he casually reads a newspaper), gets out at the “Umpire State Building,” rides an elevator to the roof, attaches himself to a rope, hoists himself to the top of a flagpole, and throws his four-fingered mitt in the air for a perfectly timed game-saving catch. Somehow, the umpire is there to make the “out” call, and so is the batter to angrily contest it, hands clenched in fists.
Some baseball fans have pointed out you’re not allowed to throw your glove at the ball. True enough. But once a rabbit has taken the field to play all nine positions, it’s time to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride — all the way to the top of the Umpire State Building.
Frederic J. Frommer is the author of “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals,” and Head of Sports PR at the Dewey Square Group, a communications firm in Washington. Follow @ffrommer.
