2020 Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary

On July 27, 2020, the U.S. Postal Service issued ten Bugs Bunny Forever stamp designs celebrating the character’s 80th anniversary. Priced at 55 cents each when issued, the stamps appeared twice each on panes of twenty. The baseball design shows Bugs warming up to pitch, recalling the 1946 cartoon Baseball Bugs.

Directed by Friz Freleng, Baseball Bugs pits Bugs against the Gas-House Gorillas, a team of oversized bullies. Bugs takes them on single-handedly, playing every position and using an assortment of tricks to outwit his opponents. One memorable gag has him strike out three batters with a single, impossibly slow pitch.

Baseball also appears in other Bugs Bunny cartoons. In Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953), Bugs interrupts the familiar argument over hunting seasons by declaring that it is “baseball season,” sending Elmer Fudd chasing a baseball. Decades later, the television series Wabbit returned Bugs to the diamond in “For the Love of Acorns” (2015), in which he helps Squeaks recover acorns buried beneath the pitcher’s mound of a newly built stadium.

The anniversary marked eighty years since Bugs’ official screen debut in Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare, released on July 27, 1940. Warner Bros. Animation artists created new artwork especially for the stamp issue, with Greg Breeding serving as designer and William J. Gicker as art director. The stamps were dedicated during a virtual ceremony, with Burbank, California, designated as the first-day city.

A total of 50,000,000 stamps were produced across the ten designs, representing a combined original face value of $27,500,000. Of these, 5,000,000 featured the baseball design, with an original face value of $2,750,000 at 55 cents each. The baseball stamp is cataloged as Scott 5502.