#the apes of wrath

[sea-buns]

I went to go take screenshots of K2's divine intervention but then Zac became the DM and K2 might be pregnant and Brennan has to navigate this and he sounds so much like a parent who was done with this shit YESTERDAY and idek where to start

[14tev]

[tuttle-did-it]

'Murder in F Sharp,' Murder She Wrote (s7 e10) guest stars

Ricardo Montalban (Khan in Star Trek, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Fantasy Island)

James Sloyan, (ST: DS9, ST:VOY, ST:TNG, The X Files, Diagnosis Murder, Matlock, The Love Boat, etc)

Aired 16 Dec 1990

[dnangelic]

everybody knows daisuke wouldn't hurt anybody ever right. not on purpose. right. ok. good. now i need to remind everybody that if you push or threaten him / the things he's deeply possessive over enough that dark can and would slam anybody into the ground and grind their skull into it while hissing and roaring with his claws and teeth out like a terrifying animal

[koraichalcum]

but he really do be having personal beefs with Raging Bolt, Gouging Fire, and especially Walking Wake--

[spyridonya]

I will forever love stories and AUs with Daeran lowkey panicking when Galfrey finally abdicates the throne.

[whenthecamerasgo]

building a moodboard

[perennialslacking]

tang/macaqu e!

thanks for enabling me :3c

[redraven25-stuff]

worst way to annotate ever!! it’s grapes of wrath and i’m dying :)

[defleftist]

Absurdity is doing a project on Grapes of Wrath in 12th grade AP Lit and playing the song Ghost of Tom Joad during it (a great Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello version) and then getting a lesser grade because your conservative radio listening teacher apparently hates Tom Morello lol.

[14tev]

[blushouyo]

happy bday lucifer 😘

[mygrowingcollection]

Gary Combs

[high-theyre-frendough]

Bugs Bunny

Growing up, I watched quite a lot of Bugs Bunny My dad had a lot of old episodes downloaded on iTunes. He also had a collection of old LaserDiscs that I grew up watching with additional Looney Tunes content. Today, I saw someone using a gif of a French cartoon chef, and immediately recognized it as a Bugs Bunny skit called French Rarebit part of which can be seen here on YouTube. The clip is about 4 minutes long, with part of the start and end of the skit cropped. That skit isn’t what this post is about. I watched these Bugs Bunny skits on iTunes as a kid, and on iTunes, there is a collection of old Bugs Bunny skits labeled as “Bugs Bunny Volume 1” where various skits are grouped together with two skits per episode. Along side French Rarebit (1951), the iTunes bundle has the Bugs Bunny skit Gorilla My Dreams (1948). I remembered the two being grouped together as I associated them with each other as a kid. Which makes sense, considering how I originally watched them.

After I saw that gif, I wanted to look up the cartoons so that I could rewatch them now as an adult. I looked for ‘the gorilla episode’ of Bugs Bunny. I remembered that clip being first when you went on YouTube, and I decided to find it first. Various clips popped up. I watched this one which is uploaded by the official WB Kids channel. It is titled as ‘Bugs and the Gorilla Baby.’ The skit shows Bugs Bunny in a barrel being scooped up by a female gorilla who declares herself to be Bug Bunny’s mother. Bugs Bunny agrees to be her baby, and is brought home. The clip is about 2 minutes long, which make sense. Warner Bros isn’t necessarily going to upload full videos to YouTube, but then I started thinking. There was a lot more to this skit than what was shown, and I remember it was one of my least favorite episodes.

Then I looked for another clip, to find more of the episode and found this clip (the title is mislabeled, saying that the episode the clip is from was from 1986 even though it was released 38 years earlier) which takes place immediately after where the official upload is cropped. In this clip (which again, takes place immediately after the clip in the original upload) Bugs is brought home by the ‘mother’ gorilla where he is confronted by the ‘father’ gorilla… who is an extremely aggressive man. I also found this clip which takes place a bit after the previously mentioned clip. This scene depicts the ‘father’ gorilla being extremely violent with Bugs, contrary to what the ‘mother’ gorilla said (treat him like a baby). Finally, there is this clip which shows the opening scene to the video, along with a random one-liner from the end cause whoever uploaded it did that.

Now, as you’ve probably figured out, this skit contains a bit of a racist stereotype. If you’re not sure, maybe go back and watch some of the clips and/or read the Wikipedia summaries linked. For the most part, the designs of the gorillas is similar to other animal designs in classic Looney Tunes. The proportions of the limbs are similar to characters such as Tasmanian Devil oddly enough if you ignore the face and other cosmetic differences (I have never watched any Tasmanian Devil cartoons as far as I remember, but his first appearance was in 1954). I can remember other, more ‘obvious’ depictions of racism in other Looney Tunes cartoons with more exaggerated features. This skit probably would’ve gotten away with having these just be gorilla characters, however the hair and certain visual changes in certain sight gags (using that term loosely here) along with the mannerisms and personalities of the gorillas is where a lot of the racism lies. The mannerisms and violent depiction along with the characters being you know, gorillas, is where the racism lies. I’m not going to go too in-depth on the racism. I think we can all recognize the content for what it is. If any POC wanna reblog with their takes on that aspect, feel free. I don’t want to go in depth on this aspect but wanted to acknowledge it.

Now at this point, I was noticing some things in the search results and in the Wikipedia article as I continued hyperfocusing on this episode. There was another gorilla-themed Bugs Bunny episode. Titled Apes of Wrath, and released in 1959, this episode of Bugs Bunny recycles the plot of Gorilla My Dreams 11 years later. The remake can be found on YouTube split up into part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. After watching these two versions of a recycled plot, I’ve been thinking about and analyzing the differences between the versions. Typically, when a plot is recycled, it is between different media (like a movie being adapted from a book). Sometimes movies in the public domain are remade with different interpretations (like Cinderella). Sometimes animated will be remade as live action. Sometimes there will even be movie adaptations of old movies with a modern twist. However, all that being said, I don’t think it is all that common for a short story like this to be remade in the same format by the same studio. The only example I can think of that is even kind of like this is Fantasia, released by Disney in 1940 (the movie contained a racist caricature and in later releases, the content was censored).

I think that it is really interesting to see two versions of a similar story written in different decades of Warner Bros cartoon history. Sure, you can look at some older episodes, and compare them to newer episodes, but with these two versions, more direct comparisons can be made. I want to analyze these two pieces of media and some of the differences to be found.

First of all, references. Bugs Bunny has always parodied relevant popular media. The original Gorilla of my Dreams skit is a parody of films like Tarzan, and other ‘jungle’ movies which were popular at the time. I’m not going to go too much into this as its not overly important. If you want to know all the little easter eggs, you can check the Wikipedia, which lists it. I’m bringing this up to show the difference in formatting. The original is more of an original story structured as an homage to what was relevant. The remake, Apes of Wrath, takes a lot of aspects to various ‘stock’ storylines which became more common in Looney Tunes stories over time. Apes of Wrath starts out with a drunken stork, a character not present in the original story. The stork loses a baby gorilla he was meant to deliver. He knocks out Bugs Bunny with a baseball bat, and brings Bugs to a pair of gorillas. Similar to the original, but with different set up, the ‘mother’ gorilla immediately accepts Bugs as her baby. Bugs immediately submits, and agrees to the roleplay. Halfway through, the actual baby gorilla is brought to the family. The ‘father’ gorilla, who had been hostile towards Bugs throughout the skit, finally has an excuse to chase him, now that he thinks Bugs decided him by pretending to be a baby.

Before I continue, I want to point out that in both versions, Bugs Bunny ends up dressed in a baby bonnet, and a diaper. In Gorilla of my Dreams, both are pink. In the sequel, the diaper is plain white, while the bonnet is blue. It’s a small change, but I can’t help but think it was deliberate. I can’t find much information on any controversy that would’ve been around at the time of the remake (to be honest, I’m not sure how I would find that) but I find it interesting if this change was on purpose.

The original also introduces Bugs Bunny as reading Esquire (which was considered an Adult magazine at the time) while he sings, sitting in a barrel drifting along in a body of water with a bottle of alcohol at his feet. The remake introduces Bugs as singing the song Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair as a play on the words ‘hair’ and ‘hare.’ So right off the bat when watching these two versions, you can see there are some differences in how controversial they want to be. The depiction of the drunken stork added to the remake isn’t really trying to be controversial, in my opinion. It feels more like an excuse to have a dumb character that talks funny which is a whole other issue. Its less “trying to be edgy” and more “depicting alcoholism as silly.”

The differences between the era are not only shown through the difference between the story structure (original parody vs commonly used formula) but through the comedy as well. While slapstick is more present in both versions, it along with exaggerated cartoon violence takes up more screen time in the original. The remake has less visual gags (such as written puns) than the original, and also includes more dialogue-based humor. This it not to say that one version is wholly without the other, this is just generally what I noticed. The sequel also has this gag, clipped in a 5 second long YouTube upload. I would recommend watching it. It is from Apes of Wrath, and is a funny little gag I did laugh at.

The shift in animation styles from Gorilla of my Dreams to Apes of Wrath is also something I wanna note. The way the characters interact with the background is different due to the changes in animation styles. I haven’t done research on it recently, but hand drawn animation is just fascinating to me. I’m not very good at drawing and techniques confuse me, but I think its cool looking at old animation rigs and stuff.

I realized that I didn’t talk about one of the big differences cause I was getting focused on the smaller stuff. In Gorilla of my Dreams, the ‘mother’ immediately decides that Bugs is her baby, and she insists that the ‘father’ be kind to Bugs. The ‘father’ gorilla has some ‘alone’ time with Bugs where he throws Bugs in the air in an abusive manner, until Bugs retaliates and fighting ensues. (This part of the episode is what I remember scaring me a a child. My father would show me that scene as an example of how I should feel lucky he wasn’t ‘as bad’ as this depiction of a father. Considering my father would toss me around as a kid, and dangle me by my ankles for fun - which was some of the tamest physical abuse from him - idk but that’s kind of fucked up. Anyways back to analyzing this old cartoon and not my childhood.) In Apes of Wrath, Bugs is watched by the ‘mother’ gorilla for most of the episode. Whenever the ‘father’ tries to be violent towards Bugs, who clearly is not a baby gorilla - he is an adult rabbit, the ‘mother’ commits acts of violence towards the ‘father.’ It is not until the actual gorilla baby is brought to the parents by the stork does the ‘mother’ stop protecting Bugs Bunny. Another note is that in the original, Bugs continues to wear the diaper and bonnet for the duration of the chase scene fight with the ‘father’ gorilla at the end of the episode. In the Apes of Wrath remake, he almost immediately ditches the baby clothes. All of this is to say that the main violence of the episode switched from child abuse to more of a domestic violence and ‘betrayal revenge’ scenario.

An additional change I would like to remark on is the change in how the gorillas are portrayed in-universe. In Gorilla of my Dreams, the gorillas are introduced at the start of the episode as extremely humanlike. A group of gorillas are depicted at the start of the episode reading magazines and books with various puns on the covers. The titular gorillas live in a house made of reeds(?) or dried bamboo(?) with appliances. It’s basically a cartoon ‘jungle’ aesthetic that closely resembles a ‘typical’ American household. The gorillas are depicted as mostly humanlike, but with a gorilla twist (for example in the establishing shot of the gorillas sitting outside, they are holding the newspapers they read with their feet). In Apes of Wrath, the gorillas are depicted like cavemen. They have a stereotypical cartoon ‘cavemen’ aesthetic, alongside similar personas. The character design is also slightly different.

All of this is to say idk how to finish this post. I just found this all interesting in a historical sene. I went to watch an old cartoon out of nostalgia, and found a different cartoon which had been remade, and went down a brief rabbithole of comparing content. I’m not sure if I ever watched Apes of Wrath. I don’t remember the stork character, or Daffy Duck’s very brief appearance at the end of the short story. I might have seen it as some time. I don’t really like either video, but I just thought this all was interesting.

The official clip upload on the Warner Bro’s YouTube channel is very clearly from the original Gorilla of my Dreams. It is carefuly cut around any depictions of the hyper aggressive and abusive ‘father’ gorilla, and it makes me wonder what is the point of having a new version? I cannot find a clip of the Apes of Wrath version on that channel. Plus, the clip that was uploaded doesn’t have the episode title. The clip for French Rarebit has the actual title, and it was uploaded to the same, official channel.

I forgot what the point was. Bye