Who is Elmer Fudd?
A more pretentious question hasn’t been asked in some time, but I seek to answer it all the same. Over the years, I’ve seen tons of debate online as to the origins of this character, primarily his association to Egghead (we’ll get to that), his current controversies (we’ll get to that), and his being “voiced” by Mel Blanc (yes, we’ll even get to that). So I wanted to touch on the lovable dullard who has indelibly left his mark on the pop culture landscape. As an appetizer to the upcoming conversation, it’s even Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny’s sarcastically referring to Fudd as “nimrod” that has recontextualized the word to be a synonym for stupid people as opposed to the name of a prolific biblical hunter.1 A large influence on not only popular culture, but even our very language.
Elmer and Egghead
This is a contentious topic, with a long-standing debate that’s raged on in the animation community for years upon years. This is funny, considering I personally thought it was resolved already. However, a contingent of people out there insist that Elmer Fudd as a character is the natural evolution of another character, Egghead. The latter appeared in many early theatrical shorts, starting in 1937 with animator Tex Avery’s Egghead Rides Again, but his presence has waned over time. In a classic hallmark of centrist thinking, I’m going to propose that both sides are actually right, just in very specific ways. The characters themselves are separate entities due in part to the very fact that they existed simultaneously for a short while (in addition to evidence pointing towards the fact that the Fudd prototype was originally marked as “Egghead’s brother Elmer” in publicity material for the 1938 short Cinderella Meets Fella).2 It doesn’t help the evolution argument that Avery was pretty adamant that they were separate people as well.
It’s obvious to anyone that looking at the character in the aforementioned short is essentially the Egghead model. BUT it was identified as being a separate character from Egghead, that being Elmer. And over the years, while moving away from the Joe Penner sensibilities and given the “milk-sop”3 voice and rhotacism-style4 impediment provided by character actor Arthur Q. Bryan, Egghead’s brother Elmer was gradually redesigned to match Bryan more closely. His nose was given some rework and he was made more portly, which lead to “Big Chungus” Elmer, as the internet loves to refer to him. That is, until he was slimmed down to his modern and more recognizable image. So, it’s undeniable that Elmer DID evolve from the classic Egghead design, given that they were designed to resemble one another, but they are in fact different persons altogether. As the final nail in the coffin, here’s an image of Egghead from 1988’s Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, long after Elmer Fudd had been established as the definitive “Looney Tunes adversary”.
Portrait of an Arthur Q. Bryan
Middle name Quirk, Arthur Bryan was a singer and actor in early radio, with a heavy stint as the recurring “Dr. Gamble” on Fibber McGee and Molly. Bryan’s first voice over work for Warner Bros wasn’t Elmer Fudd, however. In fact, he was brought over from radio to voice the titular character of 1939’s Dangerous Dan McFoo, in which two anthropomorphic dog-men fight over a dog-woman that speaks an awful lot like Katharine Hepburn. If you watch the short, you can 100% hear Bryan’s voice coming from “Dan McFoo”, it’s just the Elmer Fudd character he’d be voicing soon enough.
When I said “soon enough”, I meant one year later in 1940, when Bryan would voice Elmer Fudd for the first time in Elmer’s Candid Camera. This is roughly the eighth or ninth appearance of Fudd up to this point, with previous spotty appearances being voiced by who other than Mel Blanc. But once Bryan took over the role, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else voicing the nitwit hunter for the next two decades, up until his final short voicing the character, 1959’s Person to Bunny.5 Around this time, he passed away from a sudden heart attack. Now, Bryan didn’t voice Fudd for that ENTIRE run, as occasionally he would be sick or unable to fully vocally perform, so snippets of shorts of the years would have the likes of Mel Blanc subbing in for Fudd’s voice, and… you can usually tell pretty easily. More often than not, Fudd will be operating in Bryan’s vocal range for 99% of a short, only for the character to emit a scream that is unmistakably Blanc. This is probably best seen in Chuck Jones’s seminal picture, 1957’s What’s Opera, Doc?, wherein Fudd (as Siegfried from Wagner’s opera of the same name) lists a bevy of natural disasters to attack Bugs Bunny, ending with a yell of “SMOG!” in Mel Blanc’s voice.6
While discussing Bryan, I think it’s… important… to mention a topic that I have no proof or direct sources for. In fact, the ONLY time I’ve ever heard this mention is an interview where voice actor Billy West is telling a story about something that the now-deceased June Foray had said, so it isn’t even coming directly from someone who knew Bryan. But apparently she had mentioned to multiple people before that he “liked little boys” when referring to Arthur Q Bryan.7 I can’t stress enough that this is an indirect quote about an alleged accusation from someone that is no longer alive ABOUT someone who is no longer alive. But I would’ve been remiss not to have mentioned it.
Elmer’s Weight Gain
A small blip in the history of Elmer Fudd was his weight gain from 1941-1942. I mentioned that Fudd slowly began to resemble that of his current voice actor, Arthur Q. Bryan, but it was this single year that he truly put on the weight to match the more rotund appearance that Bryan could be associated with. For five total theatrical shorts, we got fat Elmer. These were:
Wabbit Twouble, (1941)
The Wacky Wabbit, (1942)
The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, (1942)
Any Bonds Today?, (1942)
Fresh Hare, (1942)
This is barely a footnote for his history, just a small hiccup as they continued to refine his design, but one that persists nonetheless. Perhaps primarily due to the emergence of the “Big Chungus” meme, in which Bugs transforms slightly to mock Fudd’s confidence in having bested the rabbit. Look at me, describing memes like your Great Aunt at Thanksgiving. Send me your email address and I’ll forward you a 480p compressed gif of the sneezing panda baby.
Fudd’s Future
We’ve already touched on Elmer Fudd essentially rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Egghead, and there are other Looney Tunes villains that have appeared over the year (Beaky Buzzard, Pete Puma, etc.), but none could really surpass the simplicity of the hunter/prey dynamic that Fudd could have with the cadre of other Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters. Even the eventual rise of characters like Marvin the Martian8 and Taz9 couldn’t fully eclipse Fudd’s status as Bugs’s archnemesis. The closest we came to that was with the introduction of Yosemite Sam in 1945, which gave the rabbit a deliberately temperamental bully to go up against, as opposed to the dimwitted moron that was Fudd. For a period of time in the 1950’s Sam was arguably the biggest villain Merrie Melodies had to offer, as they could supplant the character into any time, location, and profession. It was much more difficult to do that with Fudd, as rarely was he presented as anything other than a hunter, and a wildlife photographer that one time.
While he’s kept his appearances steady over the years, he tends to wane depending on the circumstances of the material. For example, Elmer Fudd would show up as one-off bad guys in the Duck Dodgers and Loonatics Unleashed television shows, not sticking around for the majority of those programs. Fudd is an extreme rarity in The Looney Tunes Show. Fudd is a news anchor that occasionally shows up to deliver a brief snippet of information regarding the plot and where it’s headed, with the other characters never really interacting with him directly within the context of the stories. It makes sense, there isn’t much room for the wildlife hunter in this domesticized sitcom premise. Though perhaps his absence is for the best, as this is also the show that in the very first episode had a musical segment dedicated to Elmer Fudd seducing a grilled cheese sandwich.
Moving into the near-present day, we reach Pete Browngardt’s beautifully directed Looney Tunes Cartoons, which only just ended its tenure on Max as of a few months ago with the release of the stop-motion short Daffy in Wackyland. While I have my own “pros and cons” list about the collection of shorts (future post maybe?), overall its a nice mostly-return-to-form that has a great sense of comedic timing, and a great deal of that come from the Bugs/Elmer pairings specifically. Lots of controversy was raised early on due to the firearm restriction, with Fudd being forced to use manual instruments of war like mallets and scythes. Of course, this was seen as strong censorship of a longtime character, but following the first season that didn’t matter anymore as Elmer was back to shoving the barrel of a shotgun into holes in the ground, as shown below from a season 2 short.
So what does the actual future hold for Elmer Fudd? Only time will tell, really, as he has yet to make any appearance in the recent (and ongoing) Tiny Toons Looniversity reboot show, and the only confirmed characters for the upcoming theatrical The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie are Porky, Daffy, and Petunia Pig. But like Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies as a whole, he’ll find a way to bounce back. Whether we get another revival show based on the characters, or heaven forbid a third Space Jam feature, Fudd isn’t going the way of Pepé Le Pew. It just isn’t his time yet.
Nimrod in the bible was a mighty hunter and king of Shinar from both the Book of Genesis and Books of Chronicles in the Old Testament. Though “nimrod” had been used derisively as a descriptor prior to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, they no doubt popularized the new context.
Statement made and material archived by Michael Barrier, although the link to the press sheet appears to be broken currently.
Per Merriam-Webster, this is a weak, cowardly man. When reading up on Elmer Fudd, you’ll encounter this phrase frequently.
Per Merriam-Webster, this is an inability to pronounce the sound the letter “r” makes. Notably for Fudd, his impediment also extends to the letter “l”.
A parody of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person television series, which was basically an interview show.
Oddly enough, this is only in the short. If you happen to listen to the recording done for “Bugs Bunny on Broadway”, I’m pretty certain they used an original take with Bryan doing a much less enthusiastic reading of “SMOG!”.
Around the 50 minute mark of this podcast is the only place I’ve ever heard this before, but apparently at least two separate people were aware of it. Hollywood rumor, perhaps?
First seen in 1948’s Haredevil Hare.
First seen in 1954’s Devil May Hare.