Edgar Allan Pooh . . . with this 1940s animated short, THE BIG SNOOZE. Bugs Bunny takes on the Humphrey Bogart part, which of course leaves the Lauren Bacall role to Elmer Fudd. Though Mr. Fudd looks better in a green cocktail dress than Ms. Bacall, that may be a moot point, given SLEEP's monochromatic nature. Whereas the live-action Bogart flick involved him and Bacall telling each other an increasingly complicated bedtime murder mystery in which even the Real Life movie director admitted he could not figure out exactly who killed whom, SNOOZE finds Bugs invading Elmer's retirement dreams with packs of bunnies and wolves until Elmer's not sure which bathroom to use in North Carolina. Since Elmer logs on and off to Reality here like a schizophrenic on an LSD trip, there's no need for SNOOZE to introduce such tomfoolery as SLEEP's hidden cameras. Elmer appears totally nude from 5:08 through 5:11 of SNOOZE, which is a lot more daring than you can credit Bacall for anything she doffs in SLEEP. However, both efforts boil down to yawners.

utgard14 Bob Clampett's final short for Warner Bros. is a classic Bugs & Elmer cartoon. Elmer's tired of the routine they're in where he chases Bugs but never wins. So he tears up his contract and quits the cartoon! Bugs, determined to get Elmer back, invades his dreams (like Freddy Krueger) leading to some surreal and wacky imagery. The music is bouncy and cheerful. The voice work from Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan is expectedly flawless. The animation is beautiful with well-drawn characters and backgrounds and lovely Technicolor. The dream stuff is amazing. Funny gags, lines, and fourth-wall breaking makes this one any Looney Tunes fan will want to see.

Lee Eisenberg If you thought that Bob Clampett had gone as far out of normalcy as possible with "Porky in Wackyland" and "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", then check out "The Big Snooze". When Elmer Fudd - tired of always Bugs Bunny always embarrassing him - tears up his Warner Bros. contract, Bugs does something that I wouldn't even imagine him (of all people) doing: he invades Elmer's dreams, creating one of the most surreal sequences that I've ever witnessed. Who would have ever guessed that Bugs Bunny was Freddy Krueger's forebear?! Above all, it's a good thing that I first saw this cartoon now, when I'm old enough to fully understand what it portrays (not to mention that I know who Bette Davis was). Had I watched this when I was six or somewhere thereabouts, I would have naively laughed at it without realizing what the gist was; or it might have scared me. As Looney Tunes screenwriter Michael Maltese said in an interview: "We wrote cartoons for grownups, that was the secret." But overall, this is a really cool cartoon. Bob Clampett, during the approximately one decade that he worked with the Termite Terrace crowd, created a body of work beyond what I could have ever conceived of. I recommend it.

movieman_kev In this last Bob Clampett Looney Tunes short, Elmer Fudd is thoroughly appalled by the treatment he always winds up getting from Bugs Bunny, so he decides enough is enough, tears up his Warner Brothers contract and commits himself to fishing for the rest of his days. Bugs is mortified of course (for his own job security mind you) and when he finds Elmer dreaming, he takes a sleeping pill and enters his pleasant dream to turn it into a nightmare. This is a hilarious if a wee bit surreal cartoon that can be seen on Disc 1 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2. It also features an optional commentary by animator Bill Melendez that is pretty good.My Grade: A