Bugs Cocotte and Confit Daffy

Lost episode

Looney Tunes

Product of Warner Bros.

20/06/2014

No matter how successful they are, each animation studio has their rotten eggs, likely made by drunks, that needed to be discarded. In this case, Warner Bros had one such rotten egg during their Dark Ages. From 1964-1967, DePatie-Freleng productions were contracted by Warner Bros to produce some Looney Tunes shorts due to their success with Pink Panther. Lasting for only around three years with most episodes featuring Daffy Duck quarreling with Speedy Gonzales, it's not very difficult to think that DePatie-Freleng's take on the Looney Tunes had little success and was taken off the air. Actually, as a little kid, I always felt a Looney Tunes episode was going to flunk whenever a DePatie-Freleng style logo of WB pops up at the beginning with the rather off tone Looney Tunes theme. Remembering those shorts today I don't really feel that bothered by them nor did I feel there were any real problems with DePatie-Freleng productions, until this happened.

Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson, the guys working on the DePatie-Freleng Looney Tunes series, one day, decided to make a lost episode... Which I found the tape of in in a broken down sewage system while taking a walk in the country side decades after it was canceled and scraped. Luckily, it came with a surprisingly functional camera and tripod. With some free time, I was able to clean it, set it up in my living room and roll the footage. What I saw was retarded to say the least.

The episode started with its typical DePatie-Freleng opening. But the theme music "Mary-Go-Round Broke Down!" Was played backwards, it's tone grew deeper and deeper until the screen flashed bright red (or perhaps pink if you will at this point, it's best to set up a drinking game for how many times I'm going to say "red", "black" and "blood") and the logo turned into a red, bloody mess of guts and a decapitated head of Tweety Bird (well, I never really cared about that Canary anyway, but what's the point?) with his/her spinal chord (which seemed to look like real bones placed on the animated frame) and end trails (that was also realistic and was placed on the animated frame) dangling out with cut and paste photos of human bloodshot eyes on Tweety's face. This was only for around one tenth of a second or so and I later had to get the tape out and shine a flashlight through the transparent frames to figure out what the Hell I just saw after watching the video... It wasted my time.

So I thought little of it for the moment (being too dumb and lazy to think better) as the title of the episode pops up saying "Bugs a La Cocotte & Confit de Daffy" (a play on "Lapin a La Cocotte" and "Confit de Canard", which are fancy French ways to say rabbit stew and cooked duck) for with photos of cooked rabbit and duck below in a black and red bloodstained background. It looked like a preschooler did the job as it was poorly organized and was in really bad condition, with the blood looking a bit out of place.

The cartoon started off with your typical classic Bugs Bunny vs Daffy Duck vs Elmer Fudd short with Fudd tip-toeing across the woods, but the screen was messy and there was a constant static noise buzzing throughout as Fudd said his catchphrase "Shh, be very, very quiet, I'm hunting Wabbits! Hahahahaha!" The scene pans across thousands of posters saying "Rabbit Season" being slapped on all the trees, most of them covering posters saying "Duck Season".

Well, no prizes for guessing, It turned out Daffy Duck hammered the Rabbit Season posters all over the place, yet his face is pasted with cut out photos of bloodshot human eyes that seem to be smothered in black markers around them and shark teeth running across his beak. Uhh, so he's supposed to be angry or something? Bugs Bunny shows up with... What the Hell! The same damn crap I said with what's on Daffy's face also slapped on his! He even sounded like a demented gargoyle when eating his carrot and saying "Eh... What's up, Doc?" With blackish red blood spilling out of the carrot. Ok, so I'm guessing the two seemed to be baring a bigger grudge on each other than usual?

Elmer Fudd arrived and pointed his... cut out photo of a rotary cannon, slapped over the usual elephant gun Fudd is supposed to be holding, at Bugs and Daffy. The build up for the slapstick starts off normally as Bugs and Daffy argued over which hunting season is it, yet the both of them sounded like someone was choking on splintered wood as if attempting to sound furious and demonic (which instead sounded cheesy). Then, the two snatched Fudd's cut-out rotary cannon photo and start shooting each other while wrestling over the gun, pulling the trigger and firing through the brawl.

At first, the squabble was harmlessly cartoonish with the typical smoky faces, but then the firing started to actually pierce through Bugs and Daffy's skin and it seems that someone in the animation studio spilled red wine all over to make an attempt to make you think they are bleeding. The shooting continues through the majority of the short, perhaps around five or six minutes, as the bullets from the gun start to tear through flesh and reveal muscle tissue, veins and intestines (all of them, again, looked like real innards placed on the animation stills). Then, the insides are shredded away to reveal the bones as Bugs and Daffy have become blood-soaked skeletons still fighting over the gun to kill one another. Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson must really seem to hate kids to animate such a knife into you're childhood to come up with this trash, or they must have been drunk.

As Juvenal and as it was, this particular section of tape has some of the most random cut outs. As I watch the sloppy animation, the tape keeps randomly jittering and cutting to stills of bloody mammalian and avian fetuses, each still frame showing them being grind further and further into a pulp... I really have nothing to comment for that schlock.

Finally, the mauling stops as what ever is left of Bugs and Daffy collapse into a gushy pile of red glop (it looked like raw grounded beef was dumped on the frame). Elmer Fudd gawks at the mess, trying to figure out what the Hell he just witnessed. He then felt a bit hungry and thought to himself "I don't know what's coming over me right now. I'm only hunting for sport, but I can't help but feel this is a waste of such good food!" And he prepares to eat the two corpses with his bare hands.

The short ends with credits, backwards "Mary-Go-Round Broke Down!" music and the logo of a headless Porky Pig bursting through the drum (with an inverted pentagram drawn on it) to say "(the sound of inners gushing out of the neck trying to say "Blee-Blee-Blee, That's all folks!")". The animation on Porky was sort of that stop-motion cut-out paper animation like in South Park, but like the Tweety head in the beginning (and nearly everything else in the short), there was a realistic spinal chord and end trails placed on top of the frame.

Before discarding the footage back into the sewers to rot in absolute disgust, I looked at the credits at the end of the video. There was an extra note written in blood at the bottom that said;

"The "Hyper-Realistic" bones, intestines and blood-effects used for the animation were made with the remains of unborn rabbit fetuses ripped out of a mother rabbit and pre-developed duck embryos purchased along with their dead mother by Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson themselves as they purchased the fresh meat from a butchers to cook for dinner at the time they were filming because they went bankrupt."

So let me get this straight. This whole visceral lost episode toilet paper roll was inspired by Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson's messy lunch of dead animals!?... They really must have been drunk!