Haredevil Hare (1948) and Marvin the Martian

Marvin the Martian was born nameless in 1948; it would be almost thirty years before any sort of name applying to him became known to the public—not until 1979, which begs the question: what did the Warner Bros. animators call him behind the scenes during all that time?

Marvin debuted in the Looney Tunes cartoon Haredevil Hare in July 1948. He played opposite Bugs Bunny. We know he’s from Mars because his spaceship is labeled the Mars to Moon Expeditionary Force. Unlike Walt Disney cartoons, which have usually been fun and/or artistic, cartoons from Warner Bros. Pictures have usually been fun and/or satirical. Satire implies the intent of “poking fun” at someone, something, or some institution. 

Okay, I have two excellent questions. Why would Bugs Bunny’s antagonist be a Martian in 1948, and what exactly was the character poking fun at?

 

Why would Bugs Bunny’s antagonist be a Martian in 1948? 

 

Outer-space topics would be all the rage two years afterward, from 1950 onwards when the movies, TV, and magazines had all gone “space happy”—but 1948? And how about the rocket to the moon? That seems to me almost scarily prescient. Why would any outer space topic be worthy of the Looney Tunes’ brand of satirization in 1948?

Nevertheless, it’s clear that something was in the air circa 1948. Not only did Captain Video appear in 1949, that very year George Pal’s Destination Moon began shooting, though it didn’t appear until mid–1950 and the sweep of promotion attending its release didn’t begin until early 1950. Which still begs another question: Why did Jones produce this first Marvin cartoon Haredevil Hare at all? Though it was released mid–1948, the copyright year on the film itself says MCMXLVII (1947), which means that whatever was being satirized was already front and center in 1947 (or ought to have been . . . but we are speaking here of cartoon logic). Here is my take on all this.

 

The film Destination Moon dealt with such a new and cutting edge concept—rocketry—and producer George Pal knew that a certain amount of exposition was necessary to educate the audience. Given that he was first and foremost an animator, only having just shut down his Academy Award Winning Puppetoon animation department at Paramount Pictures, it was second nature for him to think that this exposition could be made palatable and even enjoyable if it was presented as a cartoon. “We wanted to explain what rocketry was in an amusing way,” Pal explains in The Films of George Pal by Gail Morgan Hickman. “Walter Lantz, the creator of Woody Woodpecker, is a dear friend of mine. He was one of the first cartoonists I met when I first came to Hollywood. So he made a first-class cartoon at a cut-rate price for his—pal, George.”

 

The entire Woody Woodpecker sequence from Destination Moon. (YouTube)
(Courtesy copyright holder © Wade Williams Distribution)

 

Here is the key to this mystery (and so many others, it turns out): My sister-in-law used to work for a bank. One day she shared an anecdote about something that happened behind the scenes at a competitive bank. I asked her, how could you possibly know about that; that’s a different bank. She replied that the banking community is really very small, and everybody knows everything about what goes on within that community. That was an eye opener for me. Since then I’ve come to realize that nearly any field is actually a small community. So it stands to reason that the animation community is no different. The advent of anything new and different and worth talking about soon gets around.

 

At what point this arrangement had been settled between Lantz and Pal is unknown. Destination Moon was promoted as “Two years in the making!” If we take that “two years” seriously, then Walter Lantz was probably preparing his cartoon for George Pal at least by early 1948, most likely in 1947. 

It was at this early point that Lantz’ Woodpecker-rocket-to-the-moon production could have become common knowledge within the animation community and sparked Chuck Jones and company’s already remarkable imaginations into action—with Haredevil Hare as the result. But this may be a case of "jumping the gun".

30 seconds introducing Marvin in Haredevil Hare (YouTube)
© Warner Bros. Pictures

What exactly was the character of Marvin poking fun at?

 

Above I said: "Though it was released mid–1948, the copyright year on the film itself says MCMXLVII (1947), which means that whatever was being satirized was already front and center in 1947." But, Lantz' Woody Woodpecker cartoon was married to the feature film DESTINATION MOON. Woody would not and could not make his appearance until the larger movie was released, and there was no getting around that. In other words, Chuck Jones could have waited a couple of years to release Haredevil Hare, so that its satire would be fully appreciated by 1950's audiences when seen in juxtaposition with DESTINATION MOON.

 

If this scenario has validity, then the object of Chuck Jones’ satirization becomes clear. It should have been Woody in DESTINATION MOON. As it turned out, since Haredevil Hare would be released long in advance of the Pal picture, the object of his satirization was nothing immediately popular; it was something that would quickly become popular; and he was right about that. Lantz’ Woody Woodpecker cartoon was contained within a film that shook up and changed filmmaking forever.  

Furthermore, the world has not been the same since Marvin was born!

 

The power of Marvin is clearly in how he looks. His voice is quiet but squeaky and a bit irritating, but it’s his appearance that captures our imagination. He wears the uniform of the Roman army 2,000 years ago—a uniform very familiar to us because of the dozens of epic films we’ve seen set during that era—that is us of the 21st century. What about the audiences of 1948? Jones et al. were clearly depending on their audiences being familiar with the likes of The Last Days of Pompeii and The Sign of the Cross and other Hollywood Roman pageants of the era. Part of the joke of Marvin depended on audiences knowing that Roman centurions were always serious, and always wore skirts. And this particular uniform was chosen because Marvin was a Martian from the Planet Mars, and Mars was the Roman god of war.

“I patterned him after the god Mars,” claims Chuck Jones as quoted in That’s All Folks! The Art of Warner Bros. Animation by Steve Schneider “That was the uniform that Mars wore—a helmet and skirt. We thought putting it on this ant-like creature might be funny.”

 

“Director Chuck Jones noticed that Bugs Bunny soon began to outwit Yosemite Sam,” explains looneytunes.wikia.com, “so he decided to create the opposite type of character; one who was quiet and soft-spoken, but whose actions were incredibly destructive and also suitably dangerous.” OK, but that’s a far cry from explaining why he was specifically a Martian. Jones himself explained his creative process, as reported on chuckjonescenter.org:  "Marvin is one of those mysterious creatures that comes out of the sky or up the stairs late at night.... He is a Martian, and you cannot expect to find much personality in there ... My first step in creating the character was ... to draw the curiously tufted helmet worn by Mars, the Roman God of War.... Then I figured, black ants are scary, so I put an ant-black face and a couple of angry eyes inside his helmet."

But the “ant-like” creature also wore sneakers. Serious centurions do not ever wear sneakers. That is another hilarious juxtaposition.

 

All indications are that the little ant-like creature with the Centurion helmet that battled Bugs Bunny in Haredevil Hare was supposed to be a one-off appearance. I guess that didn’t work out!

Still, Marvin the Martian was given the grand honor of being the official NASA launch patch for Spirit, one of the two hugely successful Mars Exploration Rovers that landed on the Red Planet in 2004. How cool is that?

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