Bugs Bunny outlived the man who gave him his voice

We treat a sudden death at 46 as a cruel exception and Sunday's plans as a sure thing. The letter of James questions only the second.

On Sunday afternoon, October 25, Eric Bauza was scheduled to attend the premiere of The Cat in the Hat. A Daffy Duck short of his was playing before the film. He died at home in Los Angeles that Sunday, at 46. His family said only that he had "passed away suddenly," and the Los Angeles County medical examiner has listed the cause as hypertensive cardiovascular disease. For years he had been the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy, Porky Pig and Tweety.

James, a leader of the first church in Jerusalem and by tradition a brother of Jesus, wrote a short, blunt letter to believers scattered across the Roman world. Partway through, he turns to a group of traders.

James 4:13Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow let's go into this city, and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit."

A year of work and a profit at the end is the kind of plan responsible people make. What James hears is the tone: these people talk as if the next twelve months already belong to them. So the warning about the vapor goes to busy, decent people, because they're the ones most likely to forget it.

Bauza made plans like that, out of something more than business. He told Fox News in 2020 that he'd been doing Bugs Bunny's voice since he was 9. The characters came to him through family. His father had watched Looney Tunes in the Philippines with a grandfather Bauza never met, and Bauza hoped the work made that grandfather proud. In August he called the characters "your oldest family members," and he once said all Bugs really wants is "a carrot and a nice afternoon where no one bugs him." James doesn't ask a man like that to love the work less. He asks for one sentence to go with it.

James 4:15For you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that."

The plans survive the sentence. James puts a condition in front of them that was always there, said or unsaid. Bugs is 86. He outlived Mel Blanc, the voice Bauza called "the blueprint," and now he has outlived Bauza. When he died, Bauza's name was still on two projects in pre-production, Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical and The Dragon Masters. They were good plans, made by a man who, like every one of us, had never been promised Sunday afternoon.