Tell Me This Ain't Paducah!

In a special 4th anniversary of  The Meander Box posting, we'll take a stroll down Memory Lane (or perhaps Faltering Memory Lane)!

Remember Bunny McCracken?

Maybe not!

The roguish rabbit was first introduced in the Lancaster-Woolrich studios 1935 animated short  ELYSIAN FIELDS OR BUST, which set the pattern for most of the following McCracken shorts: Mistakenly convicted of stealing a carrot, Bunny escapes from jail and tries to find the three-legged gopher who really stole the carrot. While he's chasing the gopher, McCraken himself is being  relentlessly pursued by the tortoise detective, Shelly Green.  Slapstick comedy and wacky word-play abounded!

Bunny McCracken is best remembered for the classic catch-phrase  Tell Me This Ain't Paducah!, which swept the nation in the summer of 1936 ( one could barely pass a schoolyard, construction site, office water cooler or speakeasy without hearing those immortal words!).  I'm sure most of you have at least heard this phrase somewhere; if not, ask your grandparents.

Unfortunately, the good times for the Lancaster-Woolrich studio was not to last.  When the giant hydrogen filled Bunny McCracken balloon exploded during the 1937 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (apparently, the real first place the term "Oh, the Humanity!" was uttered), the resulting lawsuits financially crippled the company, resulting in disastrous cost-cutting measures, such as farming out the actual animation work to Venezuelan convicts and utilizing rejected Ritz Brothers scripts.  By 1939, studio owners Bud Lancaster and Roland Woolrich decided to call it quits, but they couldn't agree on how to divide the remaining assets of the company (the film shorts);  a judge decreed that the films should be split evenly right down the middle -- literally:  The films were cut in half length-wise!

As far as we know, there are no surviving prints of any Bunny McCracken cartoon, though there are those who claim a series of the shorts ran on the DuMont network in late 1949, so maybe, if somebody does some detective work...