Babs Bunny

Barbara Ann "Babs" Bunny (voiced by Tress MacNeille) is a cartoon character from the Warner Bros. animated television series, Tiny Toon Adventures. She is one of the main characters of the show and is the love interest of Buster Bunny.

Biography

Babs is a young pink and white female rabbit, who wears a yellow blouse, short pale purple skirt, frilly white panties (on Fridays only) and purple bowed ribbons near the tips of her ears. She attends Acme Looniversity and live in Acme Acres. In "Fields of Honey," Babs searches for a female mentor, as nearly all prominent classic Looney Tunes characters are male. She eventually finds one, Honey; a forgotten character from the old Bosko cartoons.

Unlike Buster or Bugs Bunny, Babs does not wear gloves with her primary outfit. However, she will wear gloves if it is required for her disguise. Examples include episodes involving "The Vanderbunnys", the "Cinemaniacs!" episode segment, "SuperBabs," the wraparounds for the episodes, "The Acme Acres Zone," "Strange Tales of Weird Science," and several others. Babs' tummy fur is pink, which can be seen when she isn't wearing her primary outfit, but is instead, wearing swimwear (though some animation cels have mistakenly given her white tummy fur like Bugs and Buster). Also, unlike Bugs and Buster, Babs does not have a pointy tail, she instead has a white cottonball-like tail (although occasionally her tail would be pointy due to animation errors).

Babs lives with her parents and many siblings in a rabbit hole near a hill with flowers and stepping stones by a creek.

Personality

Babs is a female performer, a funny bunny who will do nearly anything for a laugh. She is good at improvisational comedy, and is a comedic impressionist in the vein of Robin Williams. In "The Buster Bunny Bunch" episode segment, "Born To Be Riled," her friends become annoyed with her accurate but unflattering impersonations of them and they retaliate by impersonating her in turn. Like Buster, Babs is usually willing to go out of her way for her friends, such as in the "Music Day" episode segment, "Loon Lake," when she sabotages a bunch of swan ballet dancer bullies who are trying to thwart Shirley the Loon's ballet debut. She also is capable of quick costume changes, often achieved by simply spinning around in a circle very fast.

Babs is our new "star;" a cheerful, hyperactive, lovable and irrepressible ham. She's sassy, but with a distinctly feminine flair. Babs is a high energy impressionist and comedienne who doesn't know when to quit. Buster's best friend and co-host, Babs is a one-rabbit entertainment center. Babs is a teen-age rabbit actress, a natural performer, a long-eared clown. She bubbles over with non-stop energy, and is always jumping into a new celebrity impersonation. She uses this skill to amaze her friends, confuse her enemies, or simply to entertain herself when there's no one else around.

Occasionally, Babs goes too far with her impressions. Buster may start a conversation with Babs, only to finish it with Barbra Streisand, Princess Di or whomever else Babs happens to "be" at the moment. This can get on Buster's nerves. Also, Babs may unwittingly hurt her friends' feelings by adding them to her repertoire of impressions. She enjoys shopping, talking on the phone (sometimes to her unseen friend, Harriet), helping Buster pull a fast one, or doing anything else that could lead to some fun. Turn offs include study hall, sitting still and drama critics. Her biggest fan is Buster, her co-host and comedy partner. Like her best friend Buster, Babs feels sympathy for characters in need, and will rescue someone from an enemy by posing as a well-known celebrity or authority figure.

Babs is one of Acme Looniversity's most promising young performers. Despite getting in trouble now and then for doing dead-on imitations of pompous faculty members (like Elmer Fudd), Babs is easily the most popular girl in the school. Voted "most likely to do anything," her favorite class is "Advanced Class Clowning." Babs' ears come in handy as props while doing her impressions. She can frizz them out to create a Tina Turner effect, pull them down around her head like a scarf for a woebegone little waif, or twirl them around her head in an elaborate turban.

Babs also has her share of melting into a puddle in various episodes. In "Europe in 30 Minutes," she melts completely into a pink puddle after seeing the Royal Couple, and in "It's a Wonderful Tiny Toons Christmas Special," when Buster kisses her on the lips as his Christmas gift to her, she melts though her clothes into a pink puddle, with her eyes and clothes left on top of her melted form.

Even though Babs impersonates or parodies many different actors and fictional characters, one of the most notable characters that she parodies is Wonder Woman. She does this on a few different occasions, known as Wonder Babs instead (a bunny version of Wonder Woman), and is part of "The Just-Us League Of Supertoons" (a parody of The Justice League). Some other impressions in Babs' repertoire include Charlie Brown, Popeye the Sailor, Yogi Bear, Roger Rabbit, and real people such as Joan Rivers, a cockney, Scarlett O'Hara, Rosanne Barr, a youthful and an elderly Katherine Hepburn, Jane Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, John Wayne, Billie Burke, Dolly Parton, Margaret Thatcher, Mae West, Madonna, Cher, Dr. Ruth... Babs is a one-woman show!

Relationships

Family

Babs come from an extremely large family, she being the oldest of dozens of smaller brothers and sisters. They all live with their exceptionally tolerant mother and father in a flower-ringed hole in Acme Forest. Her mother (also voiced by Tress MacNeille), is heard but only shown from the neck down (similar to the appearance of Nanny in the animated series, Muppet Babies and Mom and Dad in Cow and Chicken). She has a father (who's only shown in silhouette or from the waist down), who appears in one episode as a monstrously large fellow who intimidated Buster when he dated Babs. However, in another episode ("Love Disconnection") where he drops Babs and her friends off at a Church for social bingo (they are actually going to a Perfecto Prep party nearby), Babs's father is portrayed differently as a normal-sized, yet goofy and clueless dad. Although Babs has dozens of siblings, only one was ever named (Mortimer), but his appearance is always different (as he is orange and undiapered in "Prom-Ise Her Anything" and light blue-gray and diapered in the "Pledge Week" episode segment, "It's All Relatives"). In "It's All Relatives," Babs is also revealed to have a grandmother, whom she refers to as "Nana". Like her mother, she is only shown from the neck down. In that same episode, as she and Babs's mother have a nice conversation, Babs's mother asks Babs to do "that funny thing you always do", and Babs spends the whole day doing impressions, but none of them are the one she wants, until the end, where she says, "I've fallen and I can't get up," which both Babs's mother and grandmother find amusing. It is never said whether Babs's grandmother is the mother of her mother or her father.

Buster Bunny

Babs is many times shown to have a crush on Buster Bunny. Sometimes Buster will nervously retreat from her advances, sometimes he returns her affection, and sometimes he even goes out of his way to impress her. In the Season 1 episode, "Prom-ise Her Anything," when Babs hints around to Buster about asking her to the prom, he retreats from her, not because he doesn't want to go with her, but because he doesn't know how to dance. He goes down to the Acme Loo film vault to learn some dance moves from the Bugs Bunny cartoon, "Hot Cross Bunny," while Babs waits impatiently and anxiously in her burrow for him to ask her out. When Buster finally does arrives at Babs's burrow, he apologizes to Babs for keeping her waiting and gives her a rose as Li'l Sneezer plays the saxophone. Later in the episode, he escorts her to the prom. In the episode, "Thirteensomething," he shows that he harbors deep feelings for her, which he only realizes after she has left Acme Acres for an acting job elsewhere. He goes to rescue her and receives a kiss from her at the end of the episode. Early in the series, Buster is shown to be easily aroused by Babs when she does her sultry routine (such as her Jessica Rabbit impression in "The Looney Beginning") or just decides to fix herself up to look nicer (such as her dress for the prom in "Prom-ise Her Anything"). In the Season 3 finale, "It's a Wonderful Tiny Toons Christmas Special," he discovers that Babs' life would be trite and miserable without him, and towards the end of the episode, gives her a kiss (this time of his own accord) and recognizes the value they have towards each other. Presumably after this, he would no longer retreat from her in any way at all.

Trivia

• Both Babs and Animaniacs character, Dot Warner, share several characteristics:
  1. They are both voiced by Tress MacNeille.
  2. They both regularly speak in high-pitched voices (though Dot sounds a little younger, due to her being the youngest of her sibllings).
  3. They both do not like to be called a certain name (Babs; "Barbara Anne," Dot; "Dottie").
• In the reboot of Tiny Toons, Babs was turned from Buster’s best friend turned boyfriend into his twin sister. This receives negative views.