Today, July 27, is Bugs Bunny’s birthday! Well, sort of. This is the day that he first appeared on screen when A Wild Hare was released in 1940. He sprang to life fully formed; his first adventure was pestering Elmer Fudd, and he already had his signature line, What’s Up, Doc?
Bugs usually delivers his line while leaning against a fence or something, chewing a carrot. He stole the scene from Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. But the line was his — or really from Tex Avery, the director, who said it was just a common phrase where he grew up. Audiences loved it, so Bugs kept using it.
Most people know that Mel Blanc was the voice of Bugs Bunny, but it was Arthur Q. Bryan who voiced Elmer Fudd — and in an odd reversal, used the Fudd voice in brief (usually uncredited) appearances as bit characters in dozens of movies throughout the 1940s and 50s. Most of his roles were things like “Train Passenger in Sleeping Car” (She Wouldn’t Say Yes, 1945) and “Fat Philistine Merchant Wearing No Robe” (Samson and Delilah, 1949). His work as Elmer Fudd didn’t get credited on screen either.
Giving credit was one of the basic ideas on July 27, 1995, when the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was dedicated. They chose the date because it’s the day the war ended, in 1953. The war itself, not to mention dividing Korea into North and South, wasn’t the Koreans’ idea in the first place. Korea was occupied by Japan during WWII, and after the war, just like Germany, it was split into a US zone and an USSR zone. The US never declared war, and President Truman called the whole operation a “police action.” That phrase is particularly hard to swallow in the face of up to three million dead civilians and nearly as many soldiers killed or wounded. There was something about it that promoted wordiness though; in the US today is National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day, and in North Korea it’s the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War.
The Korean War was a horror show for millions, including children — possibly foretold in some way by Hilaire Belloc, the English writer who wrote Cautionary Tales for Children including such entries as “Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion,” and “Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death.” Today’s his birthday. He might have been trying to be funny, but Belloc was the kind of guy who was known for being a writer and politician, but also for feuding with people for years at a stretch. He was also a proponent of “distributism,” a sort of non-state socialism based on the idea that a society’s resources should be jointly owned by its population.
Eric Rudolph probably never heard about Belloc or distributism, so you can’t read anything into his choice of Belloc’s birthday, July 27, to set off his pipe bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. He was trying to get the games canceled because he thought they were somehow meant to promote socialism.
The Atlanta Olympics weren’t cancelled, of course, and all the infrastructure built for the event made a big difference to the city. The athletes’ residences are still in use as college dorms, Centennial Park led the renovation of the downtown area, and many of the playing fields and arenas continued to be used. That includes Turner Field, which was the home of the Atlanta Braves until 2017. It hosted the Major League Baseball All Star Game in 2000, which included players like Alex Rodriguez, whose birthday, as you’ve guessed by now, is today. He might not be a Bugs Bunny fan though; one of Bugs’ lesser-known cartoon colleagues is Slowpoke Rodriguez; nobody you’d want to share a name with.
