The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special is an animated television special that was broadcast on CBS October 26, 1980. Presented as an Alfred Hitchcock-style whodunit, the plot is modeled after those of "North by Northwest" and "The Fugitive". Like most Looney Tunes specials of the time, this program consists of clips from classic cartoons with some new original animation holding them together. A criminal known as the Tall, Dark Stranger robs a bank, and Inspector Elmer Fudd mistakenly arrests Bugs Bunny for the crime. Escaping from jail, Bugs sets out to prove his innocence while evading
Bugs Bunny that another proposed name for the character was "Happy Rabbit." In the actual cartoons and publicity, however, the name "Happy" only seems to have been used in reference to Bugs Hardaway. In "Hare-um Scare-um", a newspaper headline reads, "Happy Hardaway." Animation historian David Gerstein disputes that "Happy Rabbit" was ever used as an official name, believing that the only usage of the term was from Mel Blanc himself in humorous and fanciful tales he told about the character's development in the 1970s and 1980s; the name "Bugs Bunny" was used as early as August 1939, in the Motion Picture Herald,