How a 1950's cartoon influenced the way we watched opera decades later? By John Fancher
“Those of us who didn’t freak at the sight of a rabbit in a winged helmet sliding off of the back of a fat horse—we went into opera”
At a very base level, that’s what I got from Looney Tunes at a very early age: I learned how to tell stories through music.”
Some people saw the Warner Bros. cartoon and were touched by it without even knowing it. Wig and makeup designer Anne Ford-Coates first saw the cartoon while sitting on a shag carpet eating Cheerios. Years later when she worked on her first Wagner opera she found herself looking up "What’s Opera, Doc?" and her father posted a picture of Bugs and Elmer on her Facebook page the day her show opened.
Of course some people may say opera doesn’t belong somewhere like a commercial or a cartoon. But at the end of the day the more people who are exposed to opera the better. Opera “is the greatest collaborative art form in the world, as far as I’m concerned,” says Ford-Coates. “It doesn’t have to be starchy. It’s violent and it’s dirty and it’s passionate and it’s visceral. And it also can be very funny.”
Who knows when or if the people listed in the article would have been exposed to opera if it weren’t for Bugs and Elmer?
“What’s Opera, Doc?,” Ford Coates said, “is completely appropriate because you can’t handle everything with absolute reverence all the time.”
If something can be treated irreverently then it becomes self-aware. Just look at the end of the Looney Tunes cartoon for proof. As bugs lays dying in Elmer’s arms he turns to the camera and says, “Well what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”