How Cartoonist Characterizes His Old Pals

Chuck Jones on a few of the Warner Brothers characters:

Bugs Bunny:

“Bugs was a very unusual character at Warners--a comic hero. He started out in a Harpo Marx mode, went through Groucho and ended up as a combination of Rex Harrison playing Professor Higgins (who would like to stay in and mind his own business, although still a very intellectual bird), D’Artagnan (because of the things he could do) and Dorothy Parker (because of the quips). If you blend those together, you have a pretty good idea of what Bugs was all about.”

Wile E. Coyote:

“The substance of all the Road Runner-Coyote pictures is not how to catch a road runner, it’s how many ways you can’t catch a road runner. The Coyote is his own worst enemy, which is true of all of us. To me, his relationship with the Acme Co. is the perfect symbiosis: The Coyote supports the Acme Company by buying--or at least using--the things they manufacture; the Acme Co. survives by supplying them to him.”

Daffy Duck:

“For Daffy, go back to when you were 6 years old. After you blow out the candles, your parents hand you the knife and say, ‘It’s your birthday and you can cut as big a piece of cake as you want.’ You know full well that isn’t true: There’s a particular wedge that’s surrounded by corporal punishment--if you exceed it, you’ll be sent to your room as a selfish little cad who doesn’t want anybody else to have any. Daffy does what we don’t have the guts to do: He grabs the whole cake and runs!”