Apes of Wrath USA,
NR, 7 m, 1959
The shit-faced stork from A Mouse Divided returns to blow chunks all over another expectant
couple’s hopes and dreams in Apes of
Wrath, a very funny “Merry Melodies” cartoon written by Warren Foster
and directed by Friz Freleng. Though originally released nearly a half-century
ago, Apes of Wrath hasn’t lost one
iota of its comic vitality. While tending to his deliveries in a forest somewhere, the
stork joins more than a few new sets of parents in celebratory highballs. He
winds up boiled-as-an-owl: slumped beneath a tree, he belches out his tales of
woe to a crowd of pink elephants. His final delivery, a baby boy gorilla in a
blue bonnet, is so put off by this unseemly display that he heads for the hills,
leaving the stork to his pity party. When the stork sobers up enough to realize
that he has lost his charge and just might lose his job as a result of it, he
searches the woods frantically for a stand-in. Then he hears someone with a
strange Flatbush accent singing “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” It’s
the voice of Bugs Bunny, who’s kicking back and roasting carrots over a small
fire. With club in hand (or wing), the stork sneaks up behind him and whacks him
on the noggin. A lump the size of Pike’s Peak swells up between Mr. Bunny’s
ears, and his ode to Stephen Foster begins to sound like an audiotape being
unspooled and twisted by a player with dirty heads. As his eyes cross in a
manner that would make Ben Turpin stand up and take notice, Bugs goes down for
the count. When he comes to, he’s bedecked in infant attire and dangling from
the stork’s beak—20,000 feet in the air! On an island below, a big gorilla, inexplicably named
Elvis, and his hard-as-nails wife pace about their crib, anxiously awaiting the
arrival of their newborn. When the stork finally shows up with the gorillas’
bundle of joy, Elvis jumps around and passes out bananas to some simian slugabeds
outside. But when he finally gets a load of sunny boy’s extended ears and
buckteeth, he proceeds to bash his brains in. But mama won’t hear of it; she
accepts Bugs despite his curiously un-ape-like appearance. Bugs, who’s always up
for some fun and games, decides to stick it out with this hairy, chest-thumping
brood. And why not? Mama gorilla’s got his back, which means he can fuck with
Elvis till the cows come home and not have to worry about answering for it. Mama pushes Elvis into bonding with his new son, but he
can’t table his contempt for the long-eared galoot. When given the task of
rocking Bugs to sleep, Elvis tries to do him in by way of Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Bugs cries out for mama, who responds to her child’s wails by cracking papa
over the head with a rolling pin. Later, as Elvis bounces Bugs on his knee, he
dropkicks him high enough into the sky to touch the face of God. But divine
influence must be responsible for what happens next: Bugs comes back down and
lands square on Elvis’s big head. This bloody clash goes on until the stork
stumbles back into Gorillaville with the couple’s real baby. Knowing
that the jig is up, Bugs stiffens with fear and whimpers, “Mother…” Now that the gloves are off, Elvis sets out to eviscerate
and destroy the wascally wabbit that made a (ahem) monkey out of him. Of course,
if you know anything about Bugs Bunny, you know that he’s going to outsmart
Elvis and win the day. Elvis, on the other hand, winds up getting a royal
bruising after he accidentally drops a boulder meant for Bugs on his wife’s
head. Apes of Wrath has no real punchline, but it does end with a smile
when Daffy Duck makes a surprise visit. Apes of Wrath is a remake of the 1948 “Looney
Tunes” classic, Gorilla My Dreams (a far cleverer title), which saw
Bugs Bunny being adopted by a smothering female gorilla and her feral,
sap-headed hubby. Apes of Wrath also borrows heavily from the
aforementioned A Mouse Divided, a 1956 cartoon (directed by Freleng and
written by Foster) that featured the alcoholic stork accidentally delivering a
mouse to Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester Cat. The animation here isn’t as fluid as in Gorilla
My Dreams, but it’s the laughs that count, and Apes of Wrath has
plenty. Most of those laughs come out of the over-the-top, Three Stooges-style
violence, some of which ABC felt obliged to edit out when it made this and other “Looney Tunes” part of its Saturday morning
line-up. I honestly don’t see how a Bugs Bunny ‘toon could traumatize
children (I watched ‘em when I was a kid, and I turned out okay*), but the
practitioners of political-correctness aren’t known for their smarts. *Some of my readers have taken me to task on that point. August 30, 2008 “Apes of Wrath” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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