Elmer Fudd

Note: This page is dedicated to Arthur Q Bryan and Mel Blanc altogether, may the both of them rest in peace.

" “ That'll hold 'em alright! Hehehehugh!! ” ― Elmer Fudd"

Elmer J. Fudd is one of the main antagonists of the Looney Tunes franchise. He often appears as the archenemy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. His one-sided rivalry with Bugs and Daffy has become legendary.

Why He's Hunting Wabbits

 * 1) Much like Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety, he has a unique vocal speaking that is always great to hear. As he puts W's in his speech whewe he wealwy shouldn't, makes it memorable.
 * 2) Despite him literally being created to serve as the show's go-to incompetent hunter to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (especially when he chases after them in Looney Tunes: Back in Action), he has shown to become his own person and built his own life outside of antagonizing Bugs and Daffy. There were many shorts that have shown him to be a polite everyman when he's living at home, minding his own business and wanting peace & quiet despite sometimes resorting to harsh methods in doing so.
 * 3) *Sure, he's trying to kill Bugs on a regular basis, but he's just a hunter practicing his sport and at worst a pitiful fool, it would be a huge stretch to call him "evil". Friz Freleng cited this as a reason why he disliked using the character, feeling he was too pitiful to be a real threat to Bugs compared to Yosemite Sam.
 * 4) Despite being very incompetent and much more of a goofball compared to most villains, he has had occasional moments that took even Bugs by surprise. He's outright defeated him twice over. Heck, in "Quack Shot", he was actually on top of his game against nearly everything Daffy threw at him.
 * 5) *There were times when he faked insanity and stupidity to get what he wants. Examples of these include:
 * 6) **The episode Hare Brush; where Elmer, the millionaire head of a major corporation, is in a mental hospital because he thinks he's a rabbit. He lures Bugs into taking his place, who is put in hypnotherapy and starts to think he's Elmer. The cartoon ends with Bugs-as-Elmer being arrested for tax evasion, and Elmer says to the audience, "I may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz!"
 * 7) **The episode What's My Lion?; where a Lion hides in Elmer's lodge during the hunting season, putting his head through the wall to pretend to be a trophy. Throughout the short, Elmer gets injuring it on the grounds that it's already dead and stuffed, but at the end, after Elmer gets a phone call and reveals that hunting season is over, the lion - along with all other animals that had posed as animal heads as well - leaves the lodge, only for Elmer to reveal that he knew all along and set a new record, with it taking only three hours to get all those animals out of there.
 * 8) Even outside his antagonistic roles, his role as a Butt-Monkey makes him funny and somewhat sympathetic.
 * 9) While he may be greedy, thrill-seeking, and self-serving, these traits are presented in a really entertaining manner, which sometimes makes him easy to root for despite being a hunter of the woods. It can also be considered a breath of fresh air from typically ruthless and brash villains.
 * 10) While his gullibility and his meek trait can be considered a bad quality to some, it is an important part of his character, and helps add to his charm that's unique from the rest of the malicious and strategic tricksters and predators in the show's run that tends to be more overconfident than anything else.
 * 11) When he isn't hunting after animals, Elmer can sometimes be a pretty chill guy. As he has shown kindness towards cats, kittens even! Sylvester is the only cat he has shown any form of dislike towards and nothing more.
 * 12) Unlike most predators in the show, Elmer is the most Affably Evil character in the show. As he does show thought and concern for what the animals think and say in an innocently clueless manner due to generally being a nice guy when not trying to blast (not-so-) innocent animals with his shotgun, this is probably because of him being a human interacting with two anthro toons.
 * 13) *It's also pretty subtle on how Elmer is depicted as a Sensitive Guy compared to Yosemite Sam's Manly Man as villains to make them stand out from each other by personality.
 * 14) His voice actors do great jobs voicing him. As they are all just as charming as Marvin the Martian is. Unlike most characters, Elmer has spoken in a light tone of voice, in contrast to the loud and wacky voice tone which the other Looney Tunes characters had.

Bad Quawities

 * 1) In his earliest cartoons between 1940-1942 he is depicted as a huge Butt-Monkey who gets routinely abused for little-to-no reason, with both his debut cartoon "Elmer's Candid Camera" (1940) (his debut cartoon) and "Elmer's Pet Rabbit" (1941) being the worst offenders of such. Thankfully, this was fixed after the release of "The Wacky Wabbit" (1942) when Chuck Jones made Bugs more sympathetic by establishing a rule where Bugs must always be provoked as a valid reason to torment his enemies, which went into effect beginning with "Fresh Hare" (1942).
 * 2) Elmer's unthreatening disposition was the subject of criticism for many of the Warner Bros creative team. Particularly director Friz Freleng, who thought Elmer's mild-mannered and dimwitted personality traits made it harder to place him against Bugs without Bugs coming off as a bully rather than a retaliating trickster. Especially compared to more menacing adversaries such as Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian and Rocky the Gangster, who were both created to take his place. Despite this, Elmer remained a recurring antagonist in many Bugs cartoons, though their rivalry became somewhat more laid-back.
 * 3) *Speaking of which, in his earliest cartoons throughout the years 1940-1944, Elmer had a bad habit of frequently breaking down crying like a spoiled child every time he fails to catch Bugs, which is perhaps one of the main reasons behind this said criticism of his unthreatening disposition. Thankfully this was toned down beginning with "The Stupid Cupid" (1944) and has been fixed as of the late-1940s where Elmer finally dropped this habit altogether in favor of becoming a more formidable antagonist following the success of Bugs' other famous antagonist Yosemite Sam.
 * 4) **Despite this, he surprisingly didn't display this bad habit of being a crybaby when he fails to capture Daffy in "To Duck or Not To Duck" (1943).
 * 5) Much like Porky Pig's early design from the mid-1930s cartoons, his fat design seen in "Wabbit Twouble" (1941), "The Wabbit Who Came to Supper" (1942), "The Wacky Wabbit" (1942) and "Fresh Hare" (1942) looked pretty ugly and uncanny (though to be fair, his fat design in those cartoons were modelled based off his original voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan).
 * 6) * His earliest character design in his first three cartoons "Elmer's Candid Camera", "Confederate Honey" and "The Hardship of Miles Standish" (all three released in 1940) looks very garish and off-model, as if he looked like a combination of his current design and Egghead (Elmer's predecessor)'s design, right down to wearing Egghead's eccentric clothing in the former one. Possibly justified, though, since these were his first cartoons and his design may not have been quite nailed down yet.
 * 7) Like many predators in the show, his plans are always destined to fail, which can get predictable unless there's some change to it.
 * 8) He got flanderized badly in Looney Tunes Cartoons to become a lot angrier and short-tempered to the point of being unlikable, with his intense hatred of rabbits and his fiery temper being overly-exaggerated to the point of being comparable to that of Yosemite Sam's, which heavily contrasts his original mild-mannered and sympathetic characterization.

Trivia

 * According to Baby Looney Tunes and the Looney Tunes Cartoons episode "Hare Restoration", he is a blonde, though as an adult he is completely bald.
 * Following the death of his original actor, Arthur Q Bryan, Elmer had noticeably fewer appearances, with only sporadic attempts to find a replacement (even Mel Blanc by his own admission didn't think he could replicate it). It was only after Blanc's own death in 1989, which necessitated recasting nearly all the Looney Tunes regulars anyway, that Elmer returned to his earlier prominence, with Billy West and Jeff Bergman being his most regular replacement voice actors.
 * It is unknown when Elmer became a vegetarian because in the cartoon "Easter Yeggs" he attempts to make stew out of Bugs Bunny, and the cartoon "What's My Lion?" where he prepares a steak for himself (which is promptly stolen by a mountain lion). Notably, "What's My Lion?" was aired long after "Rabbit Fire", the short where he claims to be a vegetarian.
 * According to the Looney Tunes fans, there are various songs where the lead singer vaguely sounds like Elmer including "Let's Dance" by David Bowie, "Sweating Bullets" by Megadeth, and "Someday" by Sugar Ray.

Videos
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