Fame Cartoon Characters

Bugs Bunny

you realize, this means war", "Ain't I a stinker?", "What a maroon!" (a twist on "moron"), "What a rube!", and "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque." He is the most prominent of the Looney Tunes characters as his calm, flippant insouciance endeared him to American audiences during and after World War II. He is a mascot of the Looney Tunes series, and Warner Brothers in general.

Personality and catchphrases
Bugs almost always wins these conflicts, a plot pattern which recurs in Looney Tunes films directed by Chuck Jones. Concerned that viewers would lose sympathy for an aggressive protagonist who always won, Jones arranged for Bugs to be bullied, cheated, or threatened by the antagonists while minding his own business. He's also been known to break the fourth wall by "communicating" with the audience, either by explaining the situation (ex. "Be with you in a minute, folks!"), describing someone to the audience (ex. "Feisty, ain't they?"), clueing in on the story (ex. "This happens to him all during the picture, folks."), etc.

Bugs will usually try to placate the antagonist and avoid conflict, but when an antagonist pushes him too far, Bugs may address the audience and invoke his catchphrase "Of course you realize this means war!" before he retaliates, and the retaliation will be devastating. This line was taken from Groucho Marx and others in the 1933 film Duck Soup and was also used in the 1935 Marx film A Night at the Opera. Bugs would pay homage to Groucho in other ways, such as occasionally adopting his stooped walk or leering eyebrow-raising (in Hair-Raising Hare, for example) or sometimes with a direct impersonation

Rabbit or hare?
The animators throughout Bugs' history have treated the terms rabbit and hare as synonymous. Taxonomically they are not synonymous, being somewhat similar but observably different types of lagomorphs. Hares have much longer ears than rabbits, so Bugs might seem to be of the hare family, yet rabbits live in burrows, like Bugs is seen to do. Many more of the cartoon titles include the word "hare" rather than "rabbit", as "hare" lends itself easily to puns ("hair", "air", etc.)

Within the cartoons, although the term "hare" comes up sometimes, again typically as a pun (for example, Bugs drinking "hare tonic" to "stop falling hare" or being doused with "hare restorer" to bring him back from invisibility), Bugs as well as his antagonists most often refer to the character as a "rabbit". The word "bunny" is of no help in answering this question, as it is a synonym for both young hares and young rabbits.