What's Opera, Doc?

I have to apologize to my mother. I know she and my father tried so hard to give us “culture” when my two brothers and I were growing up – taking us to New York to see Broadway shows and go to museums, playing classical music on the piano, rehearsing show tunes from her community theater productions while we cleaned the house or rode in the car (thanks to her I can now sing the entire scores of “Oklahoma,” “Sound of Music” and “Fiorello,” something I don’t think my husband really has the same patience for, especially when we’re out in public).

And I appreciate everything. I really do. You guys were the best. But for some reason – and my younger brother concurs, in fact, he was the first one to bring it up – in my adult-created memory, my entire classical music education has come from Warner Brothers cartoons. I hear “Blue Danube” and I think of the ugly duckling swimming behind all those pretty swans. I hear Wagner and anyone of a certain age knows what I’m thinking: “Kill the WAB-it, kill the WAB-it…” from “What’s Opera, Doc,” the only BB cartoon ever to win an Oscar. “Bully for Bugs” I’m sure contained something from “Carmen,” or at least that’s how I remember it. Who could forget “Rabbit of Seville” as Bugs duked it out with a demented barber. And there’s the pompous basso profundo belting out arias from "Marriage of Figaro" cowing as whispers of “Leopold” go through the crowd and Bugs steps up to the podium in white tie and tail. (For those under 35, I mean Leopold Stokowski, inarguably the most famous director in the world or at least in New York in the late 40s, when the best of the Bugs Bunny cartoons were made)

And even now if I’m flipping around and see Bugs or Daffy or Elmer, I’m glued to the spot for the next 7-8 minutes, admiring the stuff that Tex Avery or Friz Freling or especially Chuck Jones put in there that was never meant for children. During Looney Tunes 40s heyday, the animators and directors were paid so poorly and managed so laughably (the claim is that Porky Pig was modeled after one of the studio heads) that they just wrote whatever the heck they wanted.

And it was brilliant.

So maybe it was a case of adults having fun without supervision (something a well-disciplined child of the 60s rarely got to see), or maybe hearing classical music while Bugs dressed up as Carmen Miranda that made it stick harder to my gray matter than sitting in some stuffy concert hall or listening to the radio on a Sunday afternoon.

Either way, it worked. So well that when several years ago my husband and I got a last-minute call to escort my older nephew to the Met for his tenth birthday to see “Carmen,” I could close my eyes and with only a small stretch of my imagination see Bugs Bunny swinging his tail in a lace mantilla.

And we pass the torch to another generation.