Noël chez Bugs Bunny & Opération Bugs Bunny (found French live-action/animated Christmas TV special; 1997)

From The Lost Media Wiki
Revision as of 18:51, 7 May 2020 by Rno (talk | contribs) (Refined the article)
Jump to: navigation, search
Operation bugs bunny.jpg

Screencap of the special's second half.

Status: Found

Date found: 23 Feb 2020

Found by: Innerstrength

Noël chez Bugs Bunny & Opération Bugs Bunny were part of a Christmas TV special directed by Michel Hassan. It originally aired on French channel France 2, on December 24th, 1997. The first part aired at 7:00 PM with a runtime 50 minutes, with the second part airing at 8:50 PM with a runtime of 1 hour 43 minutes.[1][2]

Plot

Santa Claus is depressed and refuses to give away gifts as he usually does. Bugs Bunny is charged with finding him and cheering him up back into his job, including showing him some of his own old cartoons.

Cast

The late Michel Galabru plays Santa Claus.

Portuguese-Belgian singer Lio is credited as "Bugs Bunny's girlfriend", although it seems unlikely she is meant to portray Lola Bunny.

Other celebrities appear, such as Canadian stand-up comedian Gad Elmaleh and French singer/comedian Richard Gotainer.

Bugs Bunny himself has been described as being CGI-animated. It is possible this aesthetic choice - and the basic idea of the special itself - was influenced by the movie Space Jam that came out in France in 1997 (in which Bugs Bunny as a cartoon appears alongside live-action humans).

Gérard Surugue, who usually does the French dub of Bugs Bunny, reprises his audio role in this special.

Strangely, Dutch actress Tamar Baruch has also been credited as Bugs Bunny. It seems likely she was motion-capturing a CGI build of Bugs Bunny, in a way similar to what she did with Cléo from Cyber Flash, another 90s virtual CGI TV character.

Cléo on Cyber Flash, also performed by Tamar Baruch.

Availability

The two part special appears to have only aired once, and there was no easily accessible footage of it for a long time. It seemed that some footage used to be on the video-sharing website wat.tv, but that site had since been purchased by TF1 and its videos are no longer available.

On February 23, 2020, Innerstrength uploaded his rip of the special in its entirety to YggTorrent. It is also available to download as a mirror on 1Fichier.com.

Gallery

A still photo, from Michel Hassan's website.

Possible Related Media

A kid show block on French channel Canal +, Ça Cartoon (which ran from 1986 to 2009), aired segments involving a CGI Bugs Bunny interacting with a live-action person as early as 1996. It resembles the lone screencap that is available. Both this and La planète de Donkey Kong/DKTV were produced by Medialab, which may also be behind the Bugs Bunny Christmas special.

A similar Bugs Bunny on Ça Cartoon.

External Link

Reference