This superb compilation, appropriately narrated by another American cultural giant, Orson Welles, features the best of the 1940s Looney Tunes output, not just Bugs, but Sylvester, Tweetie, Daffy, Porky and Foghorn: 'What's Cookin' Doc', 'A Wild Hare', 'A Corny Concerto', 'Rhapsody Rabbit', 'I Saw A Putty Tat', 'Walky Talky Hawky', 'My Favorite Duck', 'Hair Raising Hare' and ''Old Grey Hare' (see my individual reviews).

As a piece of cultural history, this semi-documentary is inadequate - there is no attempt to explain the subversiveness of these irreverent, flippant, violent, beautiful cartoons in the context of Disney-dominating ick-animation and gloomy, propaganda-laden World War Two - to which many of these cartoons tacitly refer, revealing complicated truths other 'real' films couldn't dare, such as the barbaric effect fighting barbarians can have on 'our' side; there is no analysis of the glorious pretention-pricking of both Hollywood and high culture, or Bugs' androgynous proteanism, or how the cartoons retained a level of fresh invention while seemingly locked in repetitive formulae; of the powerful psychoanalytic premisses of each short, in which a wild, elusive, lawless animal stands in for our stifled desires, especially as World War Two gives on to the post-war world of Joe McCarthy and chums.

Rather, the in-between nostalgic bits celebrate harmless anecdote and japery, putting animation on its proper, neutered level. The cartoons themselves triumphantly bely such a project.