The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie is a 1979 Compilation Movie starring Bugs Bunny and other classic Looney Tunes characters. Directed by Chuck Jones, this film combines newly-animated footage linked with classic Warner Bros. cartoons, specifically those that Jones himself directed. It is the first film in the Looney Tunes compilation movie series.
In this film, Bugs Bunny gives the audience a look into, not only a fictional history of chases, but also some of the cartoons of Chuck Jones he and his associates starred in, concluding with an extended chase sequence charting some of Wile E. Coyote's greatest misses in his constant pursuit of the Road Runner.
Cartoons: "Hare-Way to the Stars", "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century", "Robin Hood Daffy", "Duck Amuck", "Bully for Bugs", "Ali Baba Bunny", "Rabbit Fire", "For Scent-imental Reasons", "Long-Haired Hare", "What's Opera, Doc?", "Operation: Rabbit".
Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner Cartoons: "Hip Hip-Hurry!", "Zoom and Bored", "To Beep or Not to Beep", "Zip 'n Snort", "Guided Muscle", "Stop! Look! And Hasten!", "Wild About Hurry", "Going! Going! Gosh!", "Zipping Along", "Whoa, Be-Gone!", "Hot-Rod and Reel!", "There They Go-Go-Go!", "Scrambled Aches", "Fast And Furryous", "Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z-z", "Hopalong Casualty", "Beep Prepared".
The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie provides examples of:
- Big Fancy House: Instead of the usual burrow in the ground, Bugs lives in a fancy modernist mansion patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallwater.
- Compilation Movie: Combines newly-animated footage linked with classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
- Compressed Adaptation: While the majority of the cartoons are left unedited, Robin Hood Daffy, For Scent-Imental Reasons, Long-Haired Hare and Operation: Rabbit all have various amounts of footage missing, likely edited out for time, inadvertently creating Plot Holes within those cartoons.
- Taken one stage further with the final segment, which is a compilation of cartoons in of itself.
- Fake-Out Opening:
- The title card at first reads "The Chase Movie". Then we hear the Road-Runner's "Beep Beep!" and "Road-Runner" replaces "Chase" in the title. And then Bugs says "Oh, no you don't!" and adds his name to the title.
- "Duck Amuck" opens in a similar fashion as it did originally.
- Framing Device: Bugs Bunny introduces each cartoon in bridging sequences.
- In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: The film's version of Duck Amuck's Fake-Out Opening has Daffy credited as playing all the main protagonists of The Three Musketeers.
- Opening Crawl: Bugs' history of chases opens with a spoof of the one in A New Hope.
- Shout-Out: While lying on the WB shield at the end, Bugs says "Eat your heart out, Burt Reynolds." Reynolds had infamously posed nude for Playgirl magazine.
- Take That!: The "many fathers" scene is Chuck Jones answering claims by Bob Clampett that he was the one who invented Bugs Bunny; Clampett's name is conspicuously absent from this scene.note
- That's All, Folks!: A new variation created for the film, apparently the idea of Chuck Jones himself (the opening credits crediting him as have a "slightly disarranged mind"). The standard ending text appears at the start of the film when Bugs appears with a Death Glare. He then adds "NOT" in the middle of "That's" and "All", resulting in "That's NOT All, Folks!" At the end of the film, the catchphrase starts writing out as normal, but is then stopped by Bugs, who then makes it rewrite itself as "That's Not Quite All, Folks!" Bugs then pulls down the end credits scroll. At the very end of the credits, we get a pre-written "That's Really All, Folks!"Bugs: After all, credits where credit is due.
