burbank - The spiritual father of Bugs Bunny has passed away. Artist Bob Givens died at the age of 99 in his hometown Burbank in California. He coined the carrot gnawing rabbit around 1938.
To this day, there is still room in the world on TV Bugs' eternal question in flat New York: What's up Doc? Givens introduced that legendary phrase in 1940, when it was first heard in the cartoon A Wild Hare.
Givens was not only at the cradle of Bugs Bunny. He coined it with, among others, Chuck Jones. The rabbit became a character in the Looney Tunes series of the Warner Bros. Studios. Other cartoon heroes of the studio were Daffy Duck. Tom and Jerry, and Popeye.
The draftsman joined the Walt Disney Studio as a draftsman in 1937, where he worked on Snow White and the seven dwarfs, a cartoon that came out in 1937. Not long after, he switched to Warner Bros.