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Tex Avery and Joe Barbera on The Cat Concerto vs. Rhapsody Rabbit
The Great Oscar Scandal of 1946!
It's a classic cartoon whodunnit! Which came first, The Cat Concerto or Rhapsody Rabbit? In one corner, MGM Cartoons with Tom and Jerry, and in the other, Warner Bros. with Bugs Bunny. Both cartoons were nominated for Academy Awards despite having identical animation and plots: a pianist gets on stage, begins playing Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2", a mouse inside the piano interrupts the performance, and hilarity ensues. Both studios accused each other of plagiarism, but no one knows who really copied who. The cartoons are too similar for this just to be a coincidence, so we decided to look into what animators from each camp said about the situation.
In Bugs Bunny, Fifty Years and Only One Grey Hare, Joe Adamson provided Tex Avery's take on the situation: "Tex Avery was a witness when the folks at Technicolor, evidently stressed out, delivered one day's Rhapsody Rabbit footage by mistake to the MGM cartoon unit, apparently confusing it with a disturbingly similar Tom & Jerry cartoon, on which Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were then pinning their Academy Awards hopes for 1947." Hanna and Barbera watched the Bugs Bunny cartoon, which was freakishly similar to their own, and realized they needed to hurry up and finish The Cat Concerto to qualify for the 1946 Academy Awards. If they submitted it under their estimated timeline, the cartoon would be eligible for the Oscars a full year after Rhapsody Rabbit, and it likely would not even be considered. So, they rushed it.
With the knowledge that Hanna and Barbera had a similar cartoon, Warner Bros. also rushed the release schedule so their cartoon could premiere even earlier and hold court as the "first" of the cartoons to premiere, and to the public, give the appearance that Tom and Jerry were copying Bugs Bunny, and not the other way around. Rhapsody Rabbit premiered on November 9, 1946, while The Cat Concerto premiered later, on April 27, 1947. MGM's cartoon came out months later, but it had an earlier showing in 1946 and now qualified for the 1946 Oscars.
The cartoons for the Oscar screening were chosen out of a hat, and The Cat Concerto was chosen first. All of the animators involved were in attendance, including Rhapsody Rabbit director Friz Freleng. In an interview with Animation Magazine, Joe Barbera remembered the screening, "When (Cat Concerto) came on, people were laughing like hell, and when the lights came on, Freleng was mad as hell...Ours ended up as one of the five (Oscar) finalists, and people had the feeling that (Freleng) was ripping off our cartoon, but he said, 'No, no, no, I never saw your goddamned lousy cartoon!'" Freleng's anger was understandable; whichever cartoon aired first was going to seem like the most original. Rhapsody Rabbit was not nominated, and The Cat Concerto took home the Oscar that year.
Production for the two cartoons certainly overlapped, but it's tricky to determine which cartoon began animation first. When asked about the potential plagiarism, Joe Barbera truly believed that both animation units happened to have the same idea at the same time. "Freleng had a sense of humor, we just thought the same, and our gags were the same." But Barbera posed this question, "What's a rabbit doing with a mouse?"
While we may never know if Warner Bros. copied MGM, or vice versa, there is a third option. The most likely conclusion is that both studios were inspired by Disney's The Opry House. In this 1929 cartoon, Mickey Mouse plays Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" comedically on a piano. Both teams of animators appear to have enjoyed the fun music and silly piano playing of The Opry House and translated that into cartoons that fit in the Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry worlds.
