The Persistence of Old Cartoon Memories – Part 2

Last Friday, I wrote about seeing a weird cartoon when I was a kid, thinking about it years later, and trying to figure out what it was I was remembering. Well, here’s another one that’s even more bizarre.

For almost all of my life, I’ve remembered seeing a cartoon about a rabbit that lived in a giant carrot. Near the end of the cartoon, there was a count-down to the launch of some kind of rocket that was going to save the day, all to the strains of some dramatic music.

That’s all I remembered – for close to sixty years! Did I hallucinate that?

Now, I know it wasn’t Bugs Bunny in this cartoon. So what cartoon bunny was it?

For a while, I thought perhaps it was Crusader Rabbit, although I don’t remember watching those cartoons at all. As it turns out – thanks to the internet – the rabbit I remembered was a character on an episode of Beany and Cecil.

Beany and Cecil?!?

Don’t you remember Cecil, the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent and his little pal, Beanie? I doubt if anyone but a true Baby Boomer would even remember this show at all. 

But we watched it. We had a Beany and Cecil story book as well as a Beany and Cecil Jack in the Box.

And one of the episodes was about this genius rabbit named Harecules who lived in a giant carrot with his father, Ben Hare. 

Harecules was an inventor, and in the cartoon constructs a secret weapon called the Guided Muscle – a sort of creepy living rocket – to combat this wolf that is out to capture him. Towards the end of the cartoon, Harecules sics it on him.

And here’s the cartoon, entitled "Harecules Hare and the Golden Fleecing." The outlandish plot doesn’t make any sense at all to me as an adult, so I can’t imagine what I thought of it when I was a kid. (I’m sure I missed all the puns and in-jokes, as well as the Al Jolson impersonation by the rabbit father.)