Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales

Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (also known as Bugs Bunny's 1001 Rabbit Tales) is a 1982 Looney Tunes film with a compilation of classic Warner Bros. cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences, starring Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck.
== Plot ==
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have to sell books for Rambling House, with Bugs assigned to sell books in Pismo Beach and Daffy is assigned Thermopolis.
While flying through a winter storm, Daffy runs into a house owned by Porky Pig and briefly stays there while taking the place of a stuffed duck, confusing Porky's pet dog Rover. Meanwhile, Bugs burrows his way to a jungle, where he pretends to be a baby ape after the drunk stork abducted him to be delivered to an ape couple after the ape couple's real baby wandered off into the woods while the stork wasn't paying attention due to being too inebriated. One half of the couple wants to do Bugs in, but manages to divert him after he accidentally drops a boulder on his wife's head.
Bugs and Daffy reunite and burrow their way to a cave in a dry desert, which Bugs initially mistook for Pismo Beach. Inside, are treasures of gold and jewels. The greedy duck tries to take the treasure, but he runs into Hassan the guard and makes a mad dash back to Bugs, who tricks Hassan into climbing into the clouds. Daffy runs back into the cave in excitement.
Later, Bugs comes across Sultan Yosemite Sam's palace in the Arabian desert. Sam needs someone to read a series of stories to his spoiled brat son, Prince Abba-Dabba, when the previous royal storyteller runs out on him looking haggard, traumatized, disheveled, and half-insane because of the bratty prince's antics. When Bugs first meets the bratty tyke and is mocked, he objects to the idea of reading to him. Sam threatens to make Bugs bathe in boiling oil, so Bugs agrees to read to Abba-Dabba. Bugs tries to escape in a variety of ways but to no avail. Bugs escapes from the palace on a flying carpet, but Sam catches him.
Meanwhile, Daffy tries to make off with the treasure in the cave. As he finishes, he makes a quick check to see if he missed anything. He encounters a magic lamp with a genie inside. Daffy pushes him back down, thinking he was trying to steal the treasure. The angry genie chases him out of the cave by casting dangerous spells on him. Daffy wanders through the desert in a search for water.
Back at the palace, Bugs is fed up with reading stories to the bratty prince, so he dumps his book in the fire. As he is threatened to be dunked in boiling oil, Bugs warns Sam not to throw him in a nearby hole which Sam eventually does. Bugs escapes and runs into Daffy. Daffy becomes pleased to see Bugs and soon sees the palace, hoping to sell books there. Bugs tries to warn Daffy about the palace, but he will not listen. He finds out the hard way, and the two walk off into the sunset with Daffy missing all of his feathers.
== Included Cartoons ==
*"Cracked Quack" - Daffy's line, "We'll just put it away in the storage for the winter", is replaced with, "Thermopolis will just have to wait."
*"Apes of Wrath" - Bugs' line, "So I'll be a monkey", is replaced with, "I'll sell books later."
*"Wise Quackers" - The opening where Daffy is flying and crash-lands like a plane on a farm and onto a pitchfork and encounters Elmer Fudd
*"Ali Baba Bunny" - ending to cartoon appears later on with Bugs removed
*"Tweety and the Beanstalk" - Chinese Tweety at the ending removed.
*"Bewitched Bunny" - Ends abruptly after the confused prince leaves the house upon learning from Bugs that he's in the wrong fairytale.
*"Goldimouse and the Three Cats" - Bugs reads the narrator's lines. In addition, Sylvester Jr's final line "Eeehh, porridge! What a father!" at the end is also removed.
*"A Sheep in the Deep" - Bugs narrates the story of "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" throughout the entire short. Only shown on early TV airings (like on CBS, Disney Channel, and Family Channel) in the 80s and 90s. The original theatrical version does not contain this short, as it was deleted from the final cut.Cut sequence from Bugs Bunny's 1001 Rabbit Tales
*"Red Riding Hoodwinked"
*"The Pied Piper of Guadalupe" and "Mexican Boarders" - This story used the latter in the middle and the beginning and ending of the former.
*"One Froggy Evening" - The ending was cut off when the man puts Michigan J. Frog back to where he first found him and quietly makes his getaway.
*"Aqua Duck" - flipped and only shown up to the point where Daffy realizes the pool of water is a mirage
==Voice Cast==
*Mel Blanc
*Shepard Menken
*Lennie Weinrib
*Bea Benaderet
*Arthur Q. Bryan
*June Foray
*Tom Holland
== Availability ==
Lt bb3 vhs.jpg|(1982) VHS
0A3129D3-692F-4EF4-B900-8B7530219056.jpg|(2001) VHS
Looney Tunes Movie Collection.jpg|(2005) DVD Looney Tunes Movie Collection (restored)
Lt spotlight df.jpg|(2014) DVD Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection Volumes 2-3 Repack
Lt spotlight v1-3.jpg|(2018) DVD Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection Volumes 1-3 Repack
=== Streaming ===
lt hbo max.jpg|HBO Max Latin America / Brazil (2022 - 2024)
lt max.jpg|Max Latin America / Brazil (2024 - )
== Music ==
* Although this cartoon uses "Merrily We Roll Along" over the Warner Communications logo, it uses "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" as its closing theme.
== Censorship and Original Television Airings==
When the movie first aired on TV in the mid-80s on CBS, it was shown with the cartoons edited, and added a deleted scene with a cartoon shown exclusively in this version. This was also aired on The Disney Channel, and Family Channel during the 1990s.https://archive.org/details/beta-79-bugs-bunny-daffy-duck-charlie-brown
Most of the sequences in the classic cartoons were cut due to violence or to save room for the commercial timeslots on CBS airings. The sequences cut were:
*The parts in "Cracked Quack" when Daffy talks to the stuffed duck was shortened, Daffy smashing the fly with his eyes was deleted, Daffy throwing a bone to Rover out the window, and the Ducks seeing Daffy from the window.
*"Goldimouse and the Three Cats" was severely edited removing these following sequences:
**Goldimouse was trying to find a bed to sleep on.
**Mama Cat's lines "And someone's been eating my porridge.", "And someone's been sleeping in my bed.", Sylvester Junior's line "And somebody's been eating my porridge, and thank goodness it's all gone.", and Goldimouse's line "A nasty old cat!"
**Sylvester trying to get Goldimouse but then she bops him in the head with a mallet.
**Every sequence of Sylvester setting up traps to get Goldimouse, leaving only one scene from where Sylvester lights up dynamite on the cheese, then cuts to where Mama Cat and Sylvester Junior walking into their bomb shelter while reading their books.
Because of the cuts and edits to the cartoons in the film, this version includes a deleted sequence that was exclusive to TV airings to replace those edited scenes. It took place after Bugs finished reading the story of Goldimouse and the Three Cats to Prince Abba-Dabba, he told the next story to Abba-Dabba, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing which featured the 1962 Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog cartoon "A Sheep in the Deep".
In addition to these edits, the CBS version has heavily cut the film, removing the entire scenes from "Cracked Quack", "Apes of Wrath", "Wise Quackers" and "Ali Baba Bunny", going from the sequence at Rambling House to Yosemite Sam's Arabian Palace. The version shown on The Disney Channel and Family Channel left in those shorts.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlOIajrPijY
This version has not been released on home video. Since the 2000s, the original theatrical version is currently shown on TV.
==Notes==
*The title of the movie, specifically the "1001 Rabbit Tales" part, is a parody of One Thousand and One Nights, the name of a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to 13th centuries.
**Despite the movie's title, "Ali Baba Bunny" is the only 1001 Nights-themed Looney Tunes short to be included in the movie, while all the other Looney Tunes shorts that parody the 1001 Nights stories such as "A-Lad-Din Bagdad", "Ali Baba Bound" and "A-Lad-In His Lamp" are not included in this movie.
*The plot of this movie is similar to that of "Hare-abian Nights", in which Bugs Bunny was forced to tell stories. Yosemite Sam was also portrayed as an antagonistic Sultan in the same short, and like this movie, the "stories" in the same short involve the re-use of footage from older cartoons.
*The character design for Prince Abba-Dabba is similar to that of the boy named Junior from "A Waggily Tale".
*The company name "Rambling House" is a parody to that of the real life book company "Random House".
*The closing card is the 1956-1957 "That's All Folks" Merrie Melodies card with the "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" closing theme, which seems to be recycled from "Boston Quackie".
*Elmer Fudd's original voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan was never credited onscreen in the classic shorts during his lifetime. In this film, Bryan receives onscreen credit for the first and only time in history, albeit posthumously, since he died in 1959, about 24 years before this film came out. For this film, archival recordings of Bryan were used to voice the Elmer Fudd character in newly-animated parts of the "Wise Quackers" sequence.
*The scene where Sultan Yosemite Sam's previous royal storyteller runs out on him looking haggard, traumatized, disheveled, and half-insane because of the bratty Prince Abba-Dabba's antics is a partial reference to the opening scene from "Mutiny on the Bunny", right down to saying that "he was once a human being".
*"A Sheep in the Deep" was not shown on any home media releases. All home media releases of the film only contain the original theatrical version without that aforementioned short<ref>https://archive.org/details/bugsbunnys3rdmovie1001rabbittales1983vhshttps://archive.org/details/bugs_20240315.
*This was the first Looney Tunes compilation feature film to use classic cartoon footage from a variety of directors, with Chuck Jones' One Froggy Evening, Bewitched Bunny and Ali Baba Bunny, Robert McKimson's Aqua Duck, and all the other classic shorts included directed by Friz Freleng.
==Videos==
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==Gallery==
1001RabbitTalesTitleCard.jpg|Original theatrical title card
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 1.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 2.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 3.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 4.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 5.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 6.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 7.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 8.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 9.jpg
1001 Rabbit Tales Cut Scene 10.jpg
The Old Storyteller from Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie 1001 Rabbit Tales.jpg
==References==
Category:1982
Category:Looney Tunes Films
Category:Package films
Category:Cartoons with music by Carl W. Stalling
Category:Cartoons with music by Milt Franklyn
Category:Cartoons with music by Bill Lava
Category:Cartoons written by John Dunn
Category:Cartoons written by Dave Detiege
Category:Cartoons written by Friz Freleng
Category:Cartoons produced by Friz Freleng