“What’s up, Doc?” How did a man eating a carrot help to create one of the best-known cartoon characters of all time? In a scene from the romantic comedy, “It Happened One Night,” actor Clark Gable chewed on a carrot while situated next to actress Claudette Colbert. With the movie’s release in 1934, the incident became readily familiar to the public, and so, when people later watched the first cartoons showing the completely developed ‘Bugs Bunny’ character, which appeared starting on 27 July 1940, they easily recognized the parody, or humorously exaggerated imitation. As time passed by, the public largely forgot about the movie “It Happened One Night,” but the ‘wascawy wabbit’ it inspired lives on in their imaginations.
