French Rarebit
French Rarebit
| 30 June 1951 (USA)
French Rarebit Trailers

While visiting Paris, Bugs Bunny wanders past the restaurants of Louis and François, rival chefs who fight to cook him, until he promises to teach them the recipe for "Louisiana Back-bay Bayou Bunny Bordelaise à la Antoine."

Reviews
utgard14

Bugs arrives in Paris via a delivery truck carrying carrots from the US. As he's walking down the street, he catches the attention of not one but two French chefs who want to cook him for dinner. The rest of the cartoon has the two rival chefs trying to see who gets Bugs, all the while Bugs is easily outsmarting them both. It's a perfectly enjoyable cartoon but, as others have said, not one of Bugs' best. The gags are amusing but nothing really hilarious. The voice work from Mel Blanc and Tedd Pierce (who also wrote the story) is great. The music is energetic and fun. I love the animation in this one. The colors are lush and bright. The characters are well-drawn and the backgrounds are quite detailed, which wasn't always the case for a Looney Tunes short.

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phantom_tollbooth

When two French chefs face off against each other over who gets to cook Bugs Bunny, Bugs winds up cooking them in this rather bizarre Robert McKimson short. The main problem with 'French Rarebit' is the chef characters who are both grating stereotypes, less offensive than they are just plain annoying (think the leprechauns from Chuck Jones's 'The Wearing of the Grin'). The whining pseudo-French takes up far more time than it should. The early scenes in which Bugs plays the two chefs off against each other are slow and unfunny but once he accompanies just one of the chefs to the kitchen, the cartoon begins to liven up. The scene in which Bugs walks him through a recipe by using him as the main ingredient is very funny indeed. When the other chef returns, however, the cartoon just begins repeating itself with gags that don't stand up to a second appearance in the same short. It seems that writer Tedd Pierce over-reached himself by including two chefs as rivals to Bugs when one would have been sufficient and made the film less cluttered. 'French Rarebit', then, is a quintessential example of "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

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slymusic

"French Rarebit" is a brilliant Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Robert McKimson. While in Paris, Bugs becomes the subject of two competing chefs' dinner menus. As all of us Bugs Bunny fans have come to expect by now, the "wascawwy wabbit" manages to outwit the two French culinary blowhards. And how! Highlights from "French Rarebit" include the following. The cartoon opens with the two chefs battling each other in order to capture Bugs. Bugs shows one of the chefs his "secret recipe" by switching places with him and dressing him up as a rabbit while the popular song "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" (also heard in countless other Warner Bros. cartoons) plays in the background; Bugs then tortures the chef by immersing him in a wine barrel, stuffing his mouth with tons of HOT ingredients, dipping him in flour, and kneading him! What's the moral of this story? Don't ever mess with Bugs Bunny, no matter how hungry your customers are!

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ccthemovieman-1

Bugs, hiding inside a crate of carrots, winds up on the streets of Paris when the crate falls off the truck. He then meanders down the street and is spotted by competing chefs. They both think the rabbit is what they need to complete their menus. The colors in here are magnificent as they make Paris look really colorful.Our bunny hero, as he usually does, makes fools of his opponents in a variety of ways that makes them look really stupid. In this case, one of the chefs is a little too stupid for humor. Although there were a handful of funny lines at the expense of the French stereotypes at the time, this really wasn't one of the better Bugs Bunny efforts.

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