Yogi, The Easter Bear

Premiered April 3, 1994.

"Easter is a celebration.  It celebrates Springtime, with life starting anew.  It also happens to be the start of Camping Season. 
-Yogi Bear

It's Easter morning in Jellystone State Park and Ranger Smith (Don Messick), the park's chief ranger, is busy preparing for the annual Easter Jamboree.  In addition to celebrating the holiday, this event also marks the beginning of camping season.

Ranger Smith has prepared Easter baskets and ordered a truckload of candy for the buses for of children that are attending the jamboree.  Smith himself plans to dress up as the Easter Bunny.  

The ranger is under a lot of pressure, because the Supreme Commissioner (Ed Gilbert) of state parks will be arriving any minute with his grandchildren.  The commissioner doesn't suffer fools and has a history of shutting down state parks he doesn't like.  Smith believes his career will end if anything goes wrong.

The ranger tells Yogi Bear (Greg Burson), Jellystone's most notorious food thief, to stay away from the Easter Jamboree.  Smith threatens to send Yogi to a circus in Siberia if he causes any trouble. 

Yogi ignores Smith's threats, steals his Easter Bunny costume and eats all of the Easter candy.  

The ranger then chases Yogi all over Jellystone and the bunny suit is wrecked in the process.  It looks like Yogi has ruined everything.  The children will have no Easter candy and Ranger Smith has reached the end of his rope and decides to send Yogi to Siberia.

Yogi's friend Boo-Boo (Messick) feels bad for Ranger Smith says he and Yogi will make things right by bringing the real Easter Bunny to the jamboree.  They visit the Grand Grizzly (Gilbert)...

...who tells them to look for "the big ears in the sky" if they want to locate the Easter Bunny.

When Yogi and Boo-Boo arrive at the Easter Bunny's HQ, they find it ransacked and empty.  Boo-Boo sees "Help Me" spelled out in jelly beans, which makes them believe the Easter Bunny is in danger.  Fortunately, they find a trail of jelly beans and hope it will lead them to the Easter Bunny. 

The Easter Bunny (Rob Paulsen) has been captured by gangsters named Paulie (Charlie Adler) and Earnest (Jeff Doucette).  Paulie owns a factory that makes fake plastic Easter Eggs.  The gangsters plan to steal the Easter Bunny's eggs so that the world will be forced to buy Paulie's fake eggs.

Boo-Boo and Yogi free the Easter Bunny and pay a visit to the Easter Henhouse, home of the Magical Chicken, who lays eggs for the Easter Bunny.  

She is capable of laying chocolate, cream, candy and regular eggs.  They plan to bring these eggs to the Easter Jamboree and save the day.  However, they'll have to get away from Paulie and Ernest, who are in hot on their tails!

Will Yogi, Boo-Boo and the Easter Bunny reach Jellystone in time to save Easter?  Will Ranger Smith get fired?  

J.A. Morris says:

This is a generally enjoyable special.  Yogi Bear cartoons were a staple of my childhood and I've always enjoyed the Hanna-Barbera characters.  It was fun to watch these familiar characters interact with the Easter Bunny and (SPOILER ALERT) save Easter.  

This version of the Easter Bunny is a likeable character.  He's accidentally injured by Yogi several times, but never loses his optimistic outlook.  However, there's a bit too much going on in Yogi, The Easter Bear.

For starters, it's 46 minutes long, or an hour long with commercials.  I felt that a lot of the dialogue was there to fill time rather than move the story along.  For instance, when Paulie tells the Easter Bunny about his plans for plastic eggs, he rants for several minutes about it.  This could've taken one sentence to cover.  There are other scenes that feel dragged out to pad the running time.

There are also a bit too many subplots that don't add a lot.  Ranger Smith says he doesn't believe in the Easter Bunny because he never got what he wanted on Easter.  Later, the Easter Bunny recognizes Smith's name when it's mentioned and says "he never believed in me."  What came first?  The disbelief or the lack of the desired Easter candy?

On a more positive note, the voice actors in Yogi, The Easter Bear all deliver solid performances.  Don Messick was the original voice for both Boo-Boo and Ranger Smith and he does a great job.  This special turned out to be the last time Messick voiced the characters.  Greg Burson is good as Yogi Bear and Charlie Alder provides a great, manically evil voice for Paulie.  Legendary comic actor Jonathan Winters has a small role as Ranger Mortimer.  

Yogi easily fools Ranger Mortimer (Jonathan Winters) into letting him have Easter candy.

The animation also looks great.  The script has some good lines that are (probably) aimed at adults.  

Yogi, The Easter Bear is recommended to all Yogi Bear fans.  As we've mentioned here before, there aren't a lot of Easter specials (compared to other holidays) so it's nice to find something else to watch this time of year.  I think there's a great 25-30 minute special here buried in the over-long scenes and distracting sub-plots.  

J.A. Morris' rating:

2 and a half Easter eggs.

RigbyMel says:  

Yogi The Easter Bear is an agreeably goofy Easter special.  Even though Yogi is his own worst enemy in the story, he does work hard to try to make up for his mistakes.  (Even if sometimes the hard work is reluctant.) 

As J.A. Morris says above, there is way too much going on in this special and the multiple subplots weigh it down a bit, preventing it from being a true classic.   

That being said, it's always fun to see Yogi in action antagonizing Ranger Smith and the Easter Bunny and Easter Chicken are cute. The voice work is great too! 

I also find it interesting that the special is set on Easter itself rather than the days leading up to Easter as is more typical for this sort of holiday entertainment.  I guess the Easter Bunny being snatched by the gangsters held up his delivery schedule? 

While this is not a holiday special for the ages, it's certainly festive and worth sharing with new Yogi fans or fans of long standing.

RigbyMel's rating: 

2 Easter eggs

Daffy Duck's Easter Egg-Citement

Premiered April 1, 1980.

Three Easter/Spring-themed cartoon shorts starring some of your favorite Looney Tunes characters!

With Easter approaching, the pressure is on for hens, since Easter is peak egg producing season. Foghorn Leghorn tells his employees they need to speed up production so they have enough eggs for the holiday. Foghorn puts extra pressure on Miss Prissy, who hasn't laid a good egg in months.  She keeps laying oddly-shaped eggs.

This changes when she lays a golden egg!  She thinks it's bad news and tosses it down a hill.

Nearby, Daffy Duck and Sylvester are hungry and scrounging for food.

When they decide to steal an egg from a chicken coop, they wind up stumbling on the golden egg.

This creates a conflict between Daffy and his feline "pal," because they both have dreams of using the egg to gain riches.

Elsewhere, a chocolate factory in Mexico is producing Easter candy.  The factory's owners hire Daffy to guard the chocolate from the local mice.  The town's mayor collects all the money the people have in an attempt to buy chocolate bunnies for the kids.  Daffy takes the money, but he sends the mayor away without any candy.

When all hope seems lost, Speedy Gonzalez, fastest mouse in all Mexico appears on the scene and is determined to save Easter for the children.

But Daffy takes his duty as security guard seriously and pulls out all stops to defeat Speedy.

In the special's final short, as winter turns to spring, Daffy flies north with a flock of ducks.  But Daffy's tired of the same old routine and decides to try a different method of migration.

He tries hitch hiking and skiing, but gets nowhere.  Daffy eventually finds a horse and decides to ride it up north, but the horse is not on board with this idea.

J.A. Morris says:
Longtime readers of this blog know that we're huge fans of classic Warner Brothers cartoons and that Daffy was a big part of our childhood.  However, this Easter special is a big step down in quality from the earlier Daffy shorts.

It's worth noting that when Daffy Duck's Easter Egg-Citement premiered on NBC, the network also aired The Daffy Duck Show as part of its Saturday morning lineup.  This show mostly consisted of cartoons produced in the 1960s by the Depatie-Freleng company that also featured Speedy Gonzalez, Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester shorts.  NBC did not have the rights to air Bugs Bunny cartoons, which is why everyone's favorite "Wascally Wabbit" doesn't appear in this special.

The positive part of this is that in Bugs' absence, we get to see Daffy interact with characters like Sylvester and (briefly) Foghorn Leghorn, something rarely seen in the classic shorts.
The show opens with Daffy talking to his animators, a nice (if obvious) call-back to the classic "Duck Amuck" cartoon.  It's a fun bit (Daffy calls the animator a "Van Gogh of vandalism!") but ultimately it just makes you notice that this Easter special is inferior.

The two Easter-themed shorts were entertaining and the Speedy toon made me smile a bit (especially Daffy's encounter with a vat of chocolate), and Mel Blanc does a nice job with all the voices.  The last short deals with duck migration and has nothing to do Easter.  It's the weakest portion of the special.  However, this special isn't a "forgotten classic" by any means.  Daffy Duck's Easter Egg-Citement rarely made me laugh, but it's generally enjoyable and fans of Daffy and the other characters will want to seek it out if they haven't seen it.

This special is available on DVD.  It can be found on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6.

Daffy Duck's Easter Egg-Citement is mildly entertaining, especially the Speedy short, and nicely animated.  I'm giving it a marginal endorsement for Looney Toons fanatics, but it's not likely to become a part of anyone's annual Easter viewing.

J.A. Morris' rating:

2 and a half Easter Eggs.

RigbyMel says: 

As J.A. Morris, says this special was produced by the Depatie-Freleng company, which also produced things like the classic 1970s Dr. Seuss specials featuring the Lorax and the Cat in the Hat as well as the Pink Panther cartoons.   Unfortunately, their work with Looney Tunes characters is not generally characterized as being classic at all.  In fact, many cartoon historians cite the Depatie-Freleng era as the nadir of Looney Tunes production.    I think I am inclined to agree with that school of thought.

To my eye,  Daffy Duck's Easter Egg-Citement feels like a cheaply animated rehash of things that had been done better previously.  The timing seems off and the music cues are nowhere near as cleverly deployed.  It even sounds like Mel Blanc is phoning in his voice characterizations a bit.  It's not utterly awful, but it really does not stand up well when compared to the classic Looney Tunes shorts.
 

It's nice to see Daffy and pals cutting up Easter-style on screen, I just wish the production values and scripting were up to classic standards.

RigbyMel's rating: 

1 and a half Easter Eggs.

Funny Little Bunnies

Premiered March 24, 1934.

"The storybooks say that far, far away,
 There's a green enchanted dell.
 Where the rainbow ends and everything is gay,
  And the Easter Bunnies dwell."

Beyond the rainbows, a veritable army of bunnies decorates Easter Eggs and Easter candy in an assembly line fashion so they're ready to be delivered by the Easter Bunny.  Like Santa's elves, the bunnies decorate all year round.  They're assisted by a flock of hens who lay eggs that rabbits decorate with every color of dye imaginable.

Chickens -- who sound kind of like Clara Cluck -- laying eggs.

Some bunnies serve as models for chocolate bunny sculptures.

Chocolate bunny sculptors hard at work.

And, of course,  the bunnies make and fill Easter baskets.

J.A. Morris says:
The summary is short because, that's basically what happens.  Like a lot of early animated shorts, Funny Little Bunnies exists so that animators can show the audience "look what we can do!"

It has lots of beautiful animation and cute animals and entertaining ways to show us how Easter candy is made and how Easter Eggs are colored.

There is one not-very-pleasant aspect of this short we should point out.  At the 1:37 mark, a bunny falls into a vat of chocolate and emerges looking like an ugly racial stereotype.  It's a product of its time and I won't hold it to today's standards.  That doesn't make it okay.  It's probably over the heads of younger views today, but if you watch it with a kid, be prepared to answer questions.

This cartoon can be found on a DVD called Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies.  It's currently out of print, but it can be purchased online and is also available at many libraries.

Funny Little Bunnies is a generally nice short cartoon and a decent addition to the somewhat limited Easter TV and film offerings.  But the racially insensitive bit and the lack of a real story prevent me from giving it a higher rating.

J.A. Morris' rating:

3 Easter Eggs.

RigbyMel says:

This is a slight, but generally enjoyable Easter short cartoon.   As J.A. Morris says above,  the animation is beautiful,  but there is some unfortunate racial and disability stereotyping that, while common in the time period,  doesn't sit well today.

Plaid paint! Och!

Disney's Silly Symphonies series was a chance for the studio's animators to flex their artistic muscles and develop the art of animation.   The series in general was notable for its use of the Technicolor process, the inclusion of primarily musical soundtracks and experimentation that was a lead up to the eventual production of animated feature films like Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs.

Egg decoration by firing squad?!?! 

I appreciated the creativity of some of the bunnies' candy production processes - getting dye colors from a rainbow was a nice touch.

So, THAT'S where Easter egg dye comes from!

Overall, Funny Little Bunnies is a cute short.  It is a solid entry in the Silly Symphonies series and is worth a look seeing as there are not very many animated Easter options out there.

RigbyMel's rating:

2 and a half Easter Eggs.