As I’ve said in the past, and reconfirmed last Friday with some of the photos I posted, Tübingen is like a fairy tale town.  So, you might think that my daily life is like that in a fairy tale,  you know, full of tales where I “fight the dragon and storm the castle” and that kind of thing.

But today, as the Broadway song Fight the Dragons was playing in the background on my computer, what I actually kept humming was “kill the wabbit!, kill the wabbit!” to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries. Why? Well, I was cleaning the apartment and trying to hunt down and vanquish not fire-breathing dragons, but a huge horde of more mundane creatures: specifically, dust bunnies.  We have an incredible number of dust bunnies that pop up each day in the apartment; even as I’m typing this, I’m sure there are half-a-dozen new ones that have just appeared somewhere nearby. I’ve actually had the occasional conversation here with people, as we try to figure out why the air and dust particles here are in perfect harmony for the amazing quick re-appearance of all the dust bunnies. I realize that dust bunnies are not unique to Tübingen, of course. But seriously – I’ve never lived in a place where you can dust in one room and by the time you’re done in the next room, new dust bunnies have already moved into the first room.

So you see, that’s why “Kill the wabbit” was my theme song today. The melody to go with those lyrics, as many of you may already guess, is from Wagner’s opera. But the lyric is from the Bugs Bunny version of the opera.  Which reminds me: we just saw Bugs Bunny on TV last week here, dubbed in German. From that, I have now learned the following sure-to-be useful German phrases:

• Natürlich weißt du, daß das Krieg bedeutet! (literally, the German means “Naturally, you know that this means War.”)
• Ist was, Doc? = (literally, the German means “Is what, Doc?”)

The show we watched included a couple of Bug’s musical performances, including the tribute/parody of Wagner’s opera. Interestingly, they didn’t try to translate the sung portions of that cartoon, just the in-between spoken bits. But it’s probably because we just saw that clip last week that the line “Kill the Wabbit!” from the Bugs Bunny version immediately came to mind today as I was battling the bunnies.

BTW, I don’t know the real lyrics of the opera song.  You see, as it turns out, if it’s true that everything I needed to know about life I learned from Broadway musicals, everything I needed to know about opera I learned from Bugs Bunny.

Anyway, here are a couple of clips from classic Looney Tunes cartoons performing classical opera. Enjoy.

• Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd performing a Wagnerian opera in What’s Opera, Doc (includes “Kill the Wabbit”)
• Bugs Bunny as the Rabbit of Seville
  To this day, the first thing I think of whenever I hear Rossini’s melody is Bugs Bunny giving Elmer Fudd a head massage with his feet. It’s memorable. I’m just saying. 😉