Late In The Game

I was late for work today. For some reason, I was thinking I was supposed to go in at 1:30...then I looked at my schedule and realized it was 12:56 and I was supposed to be in at 1PM. I was fifteen minutes late and really mad at myself. Thankfully, it was steady when I came in and the managers were all college students and teens who don't get upset when things like that happen, especially when someone who is almost never late and usually shows up early does it. I just ended up staying 15 minutes later.

I'm working my way through the Looney Tunes. Did Disc 1 with all the Bugs Bunny shorts today. My favorites were Hillbilly Rabbit, complete with that hilarious square dance finale and extremely un-PC hillbillies, Hare Do's movie theater antics (I used to have that one on my Carrotblanca video), and of course, Duck! Rabbit, Duck!, the last cartoon in the infamous "Duck Season-Rabbit Season" Bugs/Daffy/Elmer series.

My earliest introduction to some of the lesser-known lights of Warner Brothers cartoons was on, of all places, Nickelodeon. The last show of the day on Nickelodeon in the late 80s and early 90s was the 7:30PM showing of Looney Tunes. It would be the Tunes, then Nick At Nite would come on. The slightly more adult nature of the Tunes made them the perfect transition from Nick's kiddie stuff to the classic sitcoms and dramas on after 8PM.

My sisters and I would all huddle in Daddy's big chair and watch Looney Tunes together. It was one of the few shows we all loved equally. The first short would usually be a big one from the 40s and the 50s, followed by one or two public-domain black-and-white shorts. Often, these shorts featured characters like Bosco and Honey or Buddy that we'd never heard of before, or the original incarnations of well-known characters like Porky, Daffy, or Bugs. The show almost always ended with a Wil E. Coyote/Roadrunner match-up, and we looked forward to that. We developed a little bit of shtick watching these cartoons. We'd pretend to be the directors of the short, and whenever Wil E would fall off a cliff or be run over by his own creations or something, one of us would look over her shoulder and yell "STUNT DOUBLE!" To this day, I still want to yell "STUNT DOUBLE!" whenever I see the Coyote/Roadrunner shorts!