The Unmade Roger Rabbit Prequel Revealed Which Looney Tunes Character Is His Father

The unmade prequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was supposed to end with Roger discovering that a famous Looney Tunes character is his father. The classic 1988 animated/live-action comedy was a groundbreaking production and remains one of the most important and entertaining (partially) animated films of all time. It was also a box office smash, and unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for Disney to begin considering a follow-up film.

The original Roger Rabbit was an elaborate murder mystery as well as a love letter to the classic Looney Tunes cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s. It told the tale of a fictional cartoon studio whose gag-loving boss is killed as part of a plot to destroy Toon Town, home of the outlandish cartoon characters that populated classic shorts and feature films from the likes of Disney and Warner Bros. When Roger is wrongfully accused of the crime, he must team up with a washed-up detective to clear his name. The film was loosely based on a book, meaning that any sequel Disney produced would need to create its own story.

Ultimately, Disney instead chose to go the prequel route, and writers Nat Mauldin and Jeff Stein submitted the first draft for Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon on May 22, 1989. Unfortunately, due to multiple production setbacks, concerns from producer Steven Spielberg, and legal trouble involving ownership of Roger, the ambitious prequel never saw the light of day. Just what was Toon Platoon about, and which classic Looney Tune was revealed to be Roger’s father?

Despite never being made, Roger Rabbit II was fully written in 1989 with revisions being submitted in October of 1990. Instead of moving forward in time, the film was set several years before the events of the original Roger Rabbit, beginning in 1941 and ending in 1943. The film revealed that Roger had been raised by a human family and that his birth mother had left him on his adopted family’s doorstep when he was a baby. Ultimately, Roger sets out on a quest to find his real family, and in doing so ends up enlisted to fight Nazis in WWII. Along the way, Roger discovers his natural talents for entertaining, meets his future wife Jessica, defeats some Nazis, and eventually returns to Hollywood to become a movie star.

This is where the reveal of Roger’s parentage comes into play. At the end of the film, Roger is finally reunited with his birth mother, and gets an extra surprise when he meets his birth father: the one and only Bugs Bunny. The exact story behind how Bugs became a father isn’t elaborated upon in the script, but it would’ve made for an appropriate and hilarious reveal for the film. Unfortunately, the film never came to be, and the revelation that Bugs Bunny was Roger Rabbit’s father never officially appeared on the screen. However, with the original film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, still interested in making a second Who Framed Roger Rabbit? film as of 2018, it’s possible that this lost prequel could finally be produced, perhaps as a Disney+ exclusive.

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