Wabbit Season! Duck Season!

Like just about everyone my age, I love the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

I mean, I really LOVE 'em. My younger sister and I were so fond of watching Looney Tunes together on the Cartoon Network that, for several months after she died in 2004 at age 47, I couldn't bear to watch them. They were something special that we shared, Lynne and I. Of course we were re-connecting with our childhood, and there's no childhood memory more idyllic for a baby-boomer than that of sitting in front of the tube on Saturday morning, eating cold cereal and watching one cartoon after another in anticipation of a long, lazy Saturday, with the school classroom a blissful day-and-a-half away (what a long time a weekend is when you're 9!)

My favorite among the Saturday-morning lineup in those mid-1960s was The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show. And I'd be willing to bet that almost everyone my age can sing the opening song: "Overture, curb the lights, this is it, the night of nights, No more rehearsing and nursing a part; we know every part by heart..."

Those marvelous cartoons, so sophisticated in their humor because so many of them were originally made to be seen in movie theaters, where their creators knew there would be adults in the audience, have been entertaining me and my kind for 50 years and more. But what's surprising is to realize not just how entertaining they have been, but how influential, and I'm not only talking about the world of animated cartoons. I'm talking about popular culture in general, and how people my age perceive the world.

Last Sunday afternoon I was watching James Cagney in White Heat on the Turner Classic Movies channel. It's a gangster classic, and the most intense performance Jimmy the C ever gave on film. Cagney pulls out all the stops as Cody Jarrett, a psychotic killer with a mother complex and a tendency toward migraine headaches. Edmund O'Brien plays an undercover cop who joins Cagney's gang in an attempt to bring him to justice. They escape from prison together, taking off with hostages in a stolen car.

As I watched this film unfold, what was I thinking about?

Bugs and Thugs.

Fellow members of the cartoon-buff inner circle, (those who bother to remember the titles) know which cartoon I'm talking about. Bugs Bunny gets abducted by two gangsters, "Rocky" and "Muggsy." Rocky is the mean little guy with the big gun and the enormous hat that hides his eyes; Muggsy is the big, stupid one in the too-tight suit who says "Okay, Boss." During the course of the seven-minute cartoon, Bugs proceeds to torment his captors to the point where, at the end of the cartoon, they throw themselves into the arms of the police, begging to be arrested.

In White Heat, when Cagney, O'Brien and company pull into a gas station with a an overheated radiator, O'Brien goes into the men's room and scrawls a message on the mirror for the police.

I thought immediately of the same scene in Bugs and Thugs: Bugs suggests that he's going to the john, then heads straight for a public phone and gives the cops all the information they need, screaming out a detailed description of the car even as he's caught in the act and he (and the phone booth) are being dragged back to the getaway car.

If you think about it for a moment, it's...kinda scary, to use that trendy word. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and company had truly colored my perceptions of works of art at all levels. Did I say popular culture? It goes way beyond that. The most obvious example: poor old Richard Wagner. If Wagner had any notion that, a few decades after his death, a bunch of predominantly Jewish guys in Hollywood (Wagner was a rabid anti-semite) would be using his music to orchestrate the antics of a cast of cartoon characters, mostly chasing each other, I'm sure he would have...well, had sleepless nights anyway.

Let's pretend you don't know anything at all about classical music, and wouldn't know what I was talking about if I were to mention Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries from his opera Die Walkuere (The Valkyries, actually.) But if I were to put it on the CD player, oh, you'd recognize it all right. In your mind's eye you'd see Elmer Fudd jumping around with a poorly-fitting horned helmet rattling around on his head, jabbing a spear into a hole in the ground and shouting, "Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!" I swear, when I first brought home from the public library, at about age 17, an album by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra of excerpts from Wagner's Ring operas, the first notes of the Ride of the Valkyries brought one visual image to my mind: a television screen.

When my high school chum Randy first heard Rossini's William Tell overture, he described the slow section toward the end of it as "Bugs Bunny waking up music."

Talk about the power of music.

Of course one of the greatest things about the Warner Brothers cartoons, particularly the ones made in the mid-1950s, was the way they were forever satirizing Hollywood. Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, better character actors than Bugs apparently, teamed up for wacky takes on Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan and the western and science-fiction genres. Dragnet got a futuristic treatment in Porky and Daffy's classic Rocket Squad. Errol Flynn is never far away: not only are his films of derring-do sent up in Daffy Duck's turns as The Scarlet Pumpernickel and an extremely inept Robin Hood, but Flynn himself actually makes a cameo appearance in one of Bugs' films, in full costume as the master of Sherwood Forest. Drip-Along Daffy takes the boys to the Wild West, ("Anybody care to slap leather? At high noon? West of the Pecos?") and in the dawn of the space age, WB satirized the old Buck Rogers serials: "Duck Dodgers in the Twenty-Fourth and a Half Century," cast Daffy as the caped space hero and Porky as his "eager young space cadet."

I read somewhere that film director George Lucas was so fond of this cartoon that he wanted to run it in theaters ahead of the first Star Wars movie, as a way of reminding people that he, too, was sending up the Buck Rogers genre with his outer space shoot-'em-up. Copyright problems, I recall, prevented him from tipping his hat to the Warner Brothers' space adventure.

I fear that this is all over and done with now, and its like will never be seen again. The great Warner Brothers cartoons were products of an era when most of the public was reading off the same bulletin board: from the 1930s to the 1980s, most people were pretty much seeing the same movies, listening to the same radio programs and later, in the world of the Big Three networks, watching the same TV shows. It was easy for everyone, even kids, to get the jokes. A cartoon short is no longer part of the moviegoing experience: instead of a good laugh ahead of a feature film, we now get bombarded with 15 minutes of high-decibel advertising when we go into a movie theater.

Without the adult audience out there, cartoons have been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, as befits an audience of children who just want to see colorful shapes and hear loud noises. And don't talk to me about The Simpsons or South Park. I've watched both. There is nothing in demeaning, mean-spirited humor or potty-mouth talk that's going to give much to the next generation. And anyway, with 200-channel TV now, not to mention the Internet, the great audience out there is getting so compartmentalized that it's becoming increasingly difficult to identify a broad, general group that will recognize the thing being ridiculed, pick up the cultural references, get the jokes.

So what'll I do? DVD to the rescue: I already have the first DVD set of the Warner Brothers classics, and plan to get the others as they come out. I don't have any children, but I'm happy to share. Pack up your PJs and come on over some Saturday morning. I'll bust out the Kix and the Cocoa Puffs. Here's a favorite: Operation Rabbit. You see, Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, thinks he's going to catch Bugs Bunny and eat him for supper. So he builds this contraption...