Hare-Brained Ideas

The year: 1944. The cartoon: Russian Rhapsody. The plot: Hitler pilots a B‑17 and plans to bomb Moscow. But the plane is invaded by a gaggle of gremlins — from the Kremlin. They stab his buttocks, electrocute his nose, and scare him with a Stalin mask. Then they carve a hole in the floor and send him hurtling to the ground. Hitler survives the fall, realizes the Flying Fortress is now diving toward him, and tries in vain to outrun it. He is crushed; the plane’s swastika-adorned tail serves as his headstone. While the gremlins cheer, the Führer pops out of the ground. One of the gremlins pounds him back under the dirt with a sledgehammer. Cue the closing sequence: “That’s all, folks!”

Russian Rhapsody typifies a familiar style: irreverent, surreal, and, above all, violently funny. Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite, a new biography of Looney Tunes by the former Maclean’s editor Jaime Weinman, offers a thorough if breezy overview of the...