User Reviews

This is a cute cartoon, but the gags aren't especially new or inventive here, as many of them are taken from other Warner Brothers shorts, some as bits and pieces and other lifted whole. Still entertaining enough in its own right and worth watching. Recommended.

Now Horse Hare is good, but to be honest it isn't something I'd immediately recommend. The animation is good, as is the music. Bugs and Yosemite Sam have their share of fitfully amusing dialogue, the cartoon is paced well and Mel Blanc's voice characterisations are once again superlative. However, the story is a little on the predictable, and there is not much in either the dialogue or in the sight gags, though both have some very nice moments, that is particularly original or hilarious. The funniest the material is is amusing really. Then there are some of the supporting characters that border on stereotypical. All in all, it is good but there is nothing exceptional other than the voice characterisations. 6/10 Bethany Cox

The obvious point in Friz Freleng's "Horse Hare" is the stereotyping of American Indians. The plot has Bugs Bunny put in charge of defending an Old West fort from Yosemite Sam and a group of Indians (since when do cowboys and Indians form an alliance?). Bugs does what you might expect to Sam. While there's nothing totally original here, any classic Looney Tunes cartoon is a good one in my opinion. Of course, since their Golden Age was unequivocally winding down by this point, it was probably a good idea that they soon started retiring the characters. As it is, what I really like about the Yosemite Sam cartoons is that his loose-cannon personality always leads to his downfall. Maybe that's just me, but I still say so.

Anyway, an OK cartoon.

Although I saw this cartoon for the first time ever today, I noticed that every single gag had been used before in a previous cartoon. That was becoming a problem with WB cartoons by the late 50's and early 60's. I tend to view the 1944-52 time period as peak quality Looney Tines. There were sone great individual cartoons both before after this era, but I think the late 40's and very early 50's was a time when almost everything thing they did was a gem. By 1960, the artwork, the puns and the gags were often not up to the quality of previous work.

They did a lot of western spoofs, and early cartoons spoofing the cliche of Indians attacking a fort were often quite funny. Taken by itself, this cartoon is funny if you hadn't seen the previous 25 years of WB cartoons. The joke about singing Ten Little Indians while shooting at the attackers was especially old hat - I think it had been used three or four times before. The sight gags of military units charging all bunched together with swords flailing all around was amusing, but it too had been used many times before.

One good thing I will say is, that like many of their later cartoons, in this one the facial expressions of characters after getting hit on the head or blown up or what have you are hilarious. Chuck Jones greatest influence on the studio was paying close attention to facial expressions in bizarre or painful situations and I really get a laugh out of them in this short.

Basically I'd say this is a not bad example of slightly past it's prime Warner Brothers cartoon work. I gave it a 5.