Crusader Rabbit

Did You Know?

• Ragland T. Tiger's middle initial 'T' stood for 'The' (as in Rags The Tiger), and as a running gag, when asked what the 'T' stood for, he would reply, 'Larry. My father couldn't spell!'
• The revived 1956 series used a theme titled 'Juggins', composed by Van Phillips, from the British 'Impress' production music library.
• Lucille Bliss voiced Crusader Rabbit in the original series, while Ge Ge Pearson took over for the revived color episodes; Vern Louden played Rags in both.

Production history

Alex Anderson, an animator at his uncle Paul Terry's Terrytoons Studios, first came up with the idea for a cartoon series made specifically for television. Terrytoons rejected the proposal, wanting to stick with theatrical films. So Anderson teamed up with Jay Ward, with Anderson handling production and Ward securing funding. Ward took on the roles of business manager and producer, and together they founded Television Arts Productions in 1947.

They pitched the show to NBC as part of a larger concept called The Comic Strips of Television, which also included an early version of Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties. Jerry Fairbanks served as the network's supervising producer. NBC itself never aired Crusader Rabbit, but it let Fairbanks sell the series into national syndication. Many NBC affiliates, including stations in New York and Los Angeles, picked it up for local broadcasts.

WNBC-TV in New York ran the original episodes from 1950 through 1967, and some stations continued showing them into the 1970s. The series used limited animation, looking much like narrated storyboards with frequent scene cuts and minimal character movement, a style similar to another early NBC cartoon, Tele-Comics, and driven by the tight budget Ward and Anderson had to work with. Clarence E. Wheeler composed the opening and closing themes in 1948, adapting the folk tunes "The Trail to Mexico" (listed as "Rabbit Fanfare") and "Ten Little Indians" (listed as "Main Title Rabbit").

Each episode started with a title sequence showing a mounted knight galloping across the screen. The story that followed was a short, often satirical adventure structured like a movie serial, always ending on a cliffhanger.

Home video

In 1985, Rhino Entertainment put out the first two volumes of Crusader Rabbit on home video, aiming to release all the original episodes. But 20th Century Fox took over the distribution rights after buying the previous owner, Metromedia Producers Corporation. Now, The Walt Disney Company holds those rights through 20th Television. Later, in 2009, AudioTape, Inc. issued a three-DVD collection featuring 11 Crusader Rabbit serials: two in black-and-white, including "Crusader Rabbit vs. the State of Texas," and nine in color.

In popular culture

Crusader Rabbit and Rags appeared in two comic books from Dell Publishing. A 2009 biographical novel about Vietnam War soldiers, Where Is Crusader Rabbit Now That We Really Need Him? by William K. Millar Jr., was published by Lulu.com. An episode of Leave It to Beaver features a Crusader Rabbit sweatshirt in a lost and found. Actor James Garner, in interviews, jokingly compared his characters Bret Maverick, Nichols, and Jim Rockford to Crusader Rabbit, noting their tendency to land in ridiculous situations with flaky, unreliable, or comically inept sidekicks.