14 Carrot Rabbit

14 Carrot Rabbit is an animated cartoon short in the Looney Tunes series featuring Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam (here as Chilkoot Sam), directed by Friz Freleng and first released March 15, 1952.^[1] The title is a play on "14 karat", as in a purity level for gold.

Plot

The basic plot of 14 Carrot Rabbit takes place during the gold rush in The Klondike, Yukon (where men were men and women were women....a darn good arrangement), and centers on Yosemite Sam (here as Chilkoot Sam) who steals other people's gold. The story begins with an old man named Louie slouching over by a river to clean the gold he found in a pan. Sam suddenly appears, uses his gun and reputation to scare him away, and claims the gold. When he sees how little he has stolen from old Louie, he says "Picking's mighty slim around here, hardly no reward for a day's work," even though he did not work for it. Sam later takes the gold to a shop called "Next to Last Chance Saloon" to trade them for money. After the weigh-up, Sam is furious to find out that Pierre can offer only $10 for the gold.

While Sam complains about the result, Bugs Bunny wobbles into the shop with a gigantic piece of gold to trade for a couple roots of carrots. When Bugs leaves, Sam asks Pierre the origin of Bugs' finding, and he tells him that Bugs finds gold because he gets a funny feeling when he's near gold.

With this information, Sam goes to find Bugs. He sees Bugs get the funny feeling, and Bugs digs up the ground, only to find it is a lost collar button. Sam then decides to ask Bugs to be his partner; if Bugs can locate the gold, Sam will dig it up and split it with the rabbit in a 50/50 deal. Bugs stares back at the camera and wiggles his eyebrows with a smirk, knowing that Sam cannot be trusted and he will have to play some tricks on him. Choosing to play along, he asks if he really can afford to take Sam up on his offer, and Sam pretends he never had been "Chilkoot Sam" and styles himself "Square-deal Sam" instead. They stroll along together when Bugs indicates he's found gold. Bugs points out the spot and Sam starts digging for gold and rejects the partnership with Bugs. Bugs, realizing he's been double-crossed, spots a cliff and when he tries to tell Sam where he's digging, Sam just orders him to shut up and digs right through, to land in a lake below.

Soon afterwards, Bugs goes downhill, and when Sam shows up, Bugs starts digging, making Sam think Bugs is trying to get the gold for himself, so he grabs the shovel, hypocritically complaining "That's what I get, for trusting a rabbit", and starts to dig deeper and deeper, but it turns out he is in a dump truck full of rock and soil. The truck driver is Bugs, who drives the truck to a cliff and empties the truck over the edge. But Sam keeps digging and finds himself on the bottom of the soil pile and imagines that he has dug through the globe and falls into hard ground.

An angry Sam vows to chase Bugs through every state in the Union. When he finally catches up with Bugs, he has another "funny" moment. Sam tries to resist the gold-digging infatuation but, ends up caving in and starts to dig. This time Bugs was right and he finds tons of gold, but finds out that he is digging at the United States Gold Reserve in Fort Knox, Kentucky. He ends up getting taken away by US MP soldiers and charged with a felony for trying to steal the gold. Another MP finds Bugs and asks him what he is doing there; Bugs nervously replies, "Who, me? I'm waiting for a street car." At that moment, inexplicably, an ocean liner appears on the scene (despite there being no water in the vicinity), which Bugs uses to make his getaway.

See also

• List of Bugs Bunny cartoons
• List of Yosemite Sam cartoons

References

External links

• 14 Carrot Rabbit at The Big Cartoon DataBase
• 14 Carrot Rabbit at the Internet Movie Database