Rabbit Punch
Rabbit Punch
NR | 10 April 1948 (USA)
Rabbit Punch Trailers

Heckling the Champ gets Bugs into the world championship fight as the challenger.

Reviews
Gutsycurene

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

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Robert Joyner

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

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Nayan Gough

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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Ezmae Chang

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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Edgar Allan Pooh

. . . as it's a gladiator sport pairing people whose sole intent it to beat each other's brains out. Now, if we live in a World in which diminished Brain Power were a Virtue, boxing would actually make sense. But a recent survey conducted by the Ring Physicians Group (or RPG) discovered that the average pugilist lost one IQ point per fight. Since 40 bouts constitutes a typical ring career on the ropes, and 121.7 is the median Intelligence Quotient of boxing rookies, "lucky" boxers retire with an IQ in the 80 to 83 range. (Unlucky boxers die in the Ring.) This sort of mental deterioration not only bans them from driving in 18 states, but it also more than doubles the time they must spend to solve a crossword puzzle. (Though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that most retired boxers are not eligible for the Death Penalty due to their diminished faculties, many of them might be better off taking up NFL football, as Jury Nullification exempts the NFL's Best and Brightest killers from ever facing the Needle.) Bugs Bunny skates around all of these issues during RABBIT PUNCH, before he tires of such a tawdry exercise and literally cuts this cartoon short.

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phantom_tollbooth

Chuck Jones's 'Rabbit Punch' is a great cartoon in which Bugs is drawn into a boxing match with The Champ (later redubbed The Crusher in the far inferior wrestling-based sequel 'Bunny Hugged') and ends up going 110 rounds with him, each round escalating in its levels of violence until finally Bugs finds himself tied to a train track! A fast paced, beautifully orchestrated cartoon which eventually turns into a series of unusual spot-gags, 'Rabbit Punch' is full of great sequences, the best being Bugs's grease-assisted ice skating routine which is abruptly ended by a glove to the head. There's also a famous ending in which Bugs admits psychical defeat by resorting to tampering with the very cartoon itself. Unlike the lifeless follow-up 'Bunny Hugged', 'Rabbit Punch' is filled with invention and moves along at a fast lick, making it an enormously enjoyable short.

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slymusic

Written by Tedd Pierce & Michael Maltese, and directed by Chuck Jones, "Rabbit Punch" is a fine Bugs Bunny cartoon that teams him up with a familiar burly, mean-looking prizefighter who I believe was later known as the Crusher. This film certainly has the look and the boisterous atmosphere of an outdoor nocturnal prizefight, where plenty of funny gags abound as Bugs and his gargantuan opponent are not above a fair amount of subterfuge in order to win the match.There are a couple of scenes in "Rabbit Punch" that I think especially stand out. After Bugs dares to boo the multi-muscular palooka, Bugs makes a couple of hilarious facial expressions as he gets hoisted out of his hole, literally thrown into a dressing room and flying out wearing a pair of pink boxing trunks. While Bugs has a struggle with one of his challenger's legs, the big galoot peacefully lies onto the canvas playing solitaire, to the familiar accompaniment of Mendelssohn's Spring Song.As with all of Bugs' larger-than-life nemeses, in "Rabbit Punch" he takes care of his opponent not with his brawn, but with his brain. Problem is, after 110 rounds, I'm still unsure as to who the winner is.

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Lee Eisenberg

Watching Chuck Jones's "Rabbit Punch", I quickly saw that it had pretty much the same plot as "Bunny Hugged" - seeing that a wrestling champ easily clobbers his pitifully weak opponents, Bugs takes him on, and...you can probably guess what he does - although this one came first. But even knowing what sorts of things were going to happen, it was still a pleasure to watch Bugs Bunny make mincemeat out of a big bully of a wrestler (anonymous here, the big brute became The Crusher in the remake).I once read that one of the rules about Bugs Bunny getting confronted with unpleasant situations is that he never initiates the predicaments. One might say that by heckling the bellicose champions in "Baseball Bugs" and "Rabbit Punch", he initiates the predicaments. But whether or not he does, we always know that he's got more than a few tricks up his sleeve, so we need only sit back and wait for him to do his stuff. Worth seeing.

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