woodland creature” for a long, long time, and Bugs vs. I assume part of the reason they made these three cartoons was because they’d been doing “hunter vs. It’s kind of this weird inversion of the standard trope. If the bullets can’t hurt him, why should he care if it’s Duck Season? Except Daffy’s only doing all of this because he’s afraid of getting shot, and because he kind of has it in for Bugs for some reason. Coyote blowing himself or falling off a cliff. That’s no big deal, it’s part of the internal cartoon logic.

I’ve seen these cartoons my whole life, but the thing I couldn’t shake this time around was that Daffy gets shot repeatedly, but he never gets hurt. In the past, Daffy would have just outwitted hunters directly, but here he’s trying to shift the problem onto someone else. The trilogy marks the shift from Daffy as a screwball type to a self-centered opportunist. Only Bugs keeps turning the tables on them both, and so Daffy’s always the one who gets shot. The whole point of these cartoons is that it’s really Duck Season, and Daffy’s trying to trick Elmer Fudd into thinking it’s Rabbit Season so he’ll shoot Bugs instead. The first was “Rabbit Fire” (1951), followed by “Rabbit Seasoning” (1952), then “Duck, Rabbit, Duck” (1953). Today I watched all three installments of the “Hunting Trilogy”, which is just a fancy name for the three cartoons where Bugs and Daffy argue over whether it’s Rabbit Season or Duck Season.

Elmer fudd hunting ducks picture