Warner Bros. Had One Rule For Its Biggest Characters In Who Framed Roger Rabbit

In Robert Zemeckis’ whimsical film noir “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the alcoholic detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) has to, in the course of his investigations, travel to a particularly dangerous part of Los Angeles. Toontown, located out by Pasadena, is the cordoned-off part of the city where its cartoon citizens all live, and it has been built specifically with a toon citizenry in mind. The laws of physics change in Toontown, and even the buildings are alive and conscious. Eddie, a live-action human, finds himself in constant mortal peril. 

In one standout sequence, Eddie finds himself plummeting off the top of a Toontown high-rise. While in free-fall, he encounters two familiar faces. Bugs Bunny (Mel Blanc) and Mickey Mouse (Wayne Allwine), outfitted in skydiving gear, pull up next to Eddie and casually point out that skydiving with a parachute is kind of dangerous. They eventually offer Eddie a spare parachute before pulling the ripcords on their own. As a final gag, the “spare” they handed Eddie was a spare tire. Luckily, Eddie is caught before he can smack into the toon pavement below. 

In 1988, when “Roger Rabbit” was released, audiences stood in awe of the skydiving scene. Everyone watching knew that Mickey Mouse was the official mascot of the Disney corporation, while Bugs Bunny was the face of Warner Bros. The two characters were seen as corporate rivals, and they never occupied the same space. Seeing Bugs and Mickey on screen together allowed viewers to ponder the byzantine legal rigmarole likely required to make the scene possible. 

As it so happens, there was a careful balancing act required for the many cartoon crossover scenes in”Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” According to a 2018 article in the Hollywood Reporter, we can all thank Steven Spielberg for the diverse licensed-character mishmash. And even then, there were stipulations surrounding several Warner Bros. characters. 

Throughout “Roger Rabbit,” one can see characters owned by Disney, Warner Bros., King Features, Turner, Fleischer Studios, and several others. In many scenes, these characters appear next to each other, most notably in the film’s final scenes ,when the denizens of Toontown all spill into the real world together. 

“Roger Rabbit” was distributed by Touchstone Pictures, the arm of the Disney corporation earmarked for more adult fare. At the time, Michael Eisner was head of Disney, and he was still friends with ultra-director Steven Spielberg from their mutual Paramount days (Spielberg made “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for Paramount when Eisner was still a Paramount muckety-muck). It seems that Spielberg — the producer of “Roger Rabbit” — had the wherewithal to ask all the above animation studios to lend out their most famous characters, offering them all a flat rate of $5,000 per character. The above shot alone cost at least $115,000 to license. 

Warner Bros., however, knowing that Disney was a rival, had a demand: Bugs Bunny could only share the screen with Mickey Mouse if both characters were given exact equal screen time. This is why Bugs and Mickey appeared on-screen together and stayed on screen together for the length of their skydiving sequence. This was also true of the film’s finale, wherein Bugs and Mickey were seen standing next to one another. 

WB’s stipulation also held for other characters. Earlier in the film, both WB’s Daffy Duck and Disney’s Donald Duck were playing piano at a toon nightclub, and their screentime is exactly equal. Same for the film’s final shot, wherein WB’s Porky Pig got to say his trademark “That’s All Folks!,” before being magicked away by Disney’s Tinkerbell. We will ignore for the moment that “Roger Rabbit” takes place in 1947, and that Disney’s Tinkerbell wasn’t invented until 1953. 

The website Disney Diary also pointed out that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse had one other rule to abide: The two weren’t allowed to say each other’s full names. One might note that Bugs never refers to Mickey as “Mickey,” and Mickey called Bugs Bunny as just “Bugs.” This may have been a legal requirement, but it was also in-character. Mickey would refer to friends by their first names, while Bugs tended to call people “doc.” If Bugs really wanted to be serious, he might have referred to Mr. Mouse as “Michael.” 

One would have to do some serious, time-consuming scrutiny to clock the many, many “Roger Rabbit” cameos, however. It’s wholly possible that Disney’s Dumbo, for instance, has just as much screen time as Yosemite Sam (Blanc). There might have been a bean-counter somewhere inside Warner Bros. counting out the animated frames of WB characters vs. Disney characters. As a casual viewer who hasn’t bothered to engage in such scrutiny, I can say that the balance at least feels correct. 

Steven Spielberg tried to make a similar crossover mashup in 2018 with the release of “Ready Player One,” based on the novel by Ernest Cline. That film took place largely inside a vast, computer-generated simulation, wherein players were invited to invent whatever digital avatars they liked. Most of them took their character design cues from a messianic, pop-culture-obsessed Gen-Xer, and disguised themselves as characters like Jason Vorhees, RoboCop, “Mortal Kombat” fighters, Hello Kitty figures, monsters, superheroes, and other figures culled from ’80s and ’90s pop media (though Spielberg tried to pull back references to his own movies). The result, however, wasn’t as exciting or striking as it had been 30 years earlier. Pop culture had become overtly corporate, and there was no longer any delight in seeing pop figures interact. “Roger Rabbit” was a peek through the door. “Ready Player One” was just a sign we were drowning.