Everything I Learned About Opera, I Learned from a Cartoon Rabbit

Imagine the pitch meeting: “Okay, so we take five operas, mash them together into a seven-minute cartoon, and make a rabbit the star. Oh, and let’s throw in a guy with a speech impediment who’s really into hunting wabbits—uh, rabbits.” The room probably went silent for a moment before someone said, “Genius. Let’s do it.” And thus, my accidental education in opera began—not in a grand, velvet-draped theater, but on a Saturday morning with a bowl of sugary cereal in hand.

You see, I didn’t learn about Wagner, Rossini, or Strauss from a snooty highfalutin professor in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. No, I learned it from Bugs Bunny, who somehow managed to cram the essence of high art into a zany, Technicolor world where anvils drop from the sky and nobody ever questions why the rabbit is in drag. If you think about it, that’s a pretty fitting metaphor for life: sometimes the most profound lessons come wrapped in the absurd.

Opera, for all its grandiosity, (yes, 5?syllables in gandiosity and for those of you playing scrabble, that how many point is that?) is really just a mashup of the things we’re already grappling with—love, death, good, evil, and the occasional magic ring (or helmet, whatever) that grants ultimate power (I’m looking at you, Tolkien fans). It’s classical music meets theater meets athletic endurance, where the characters belt out their most intense emotions while dressed in costumes that would make even Lady Gaga do a double-take.

And let’s be real here for a minute: opera can be intimidating. It’s got its own language, its own rules, and arias that seem to last longer than your last Zoom meeting. But here’s the thing—if a seven-year-old can grasp the basics of Wagner through a rabbit and a hunter, maybe it’s not as inaccessible as we think. Maybe the key to understanding complex things, whether it’s opera or complex tribological product design, is to break it down into bite-sized, digestible pieces that people can enjoy, even if they’re not fully aware of what they’re consuming. And, yeah, I get it, the proverbial ACME anvil falling out of the say never hurts either!

So, no, I’m not suggesting we all start creating cartoon shorts to explain our products (though, wouldn’t that be something?). But I am saying that we’ve got to meet people where they are, whether that’s on a stage, a screen, or a cereal-stained couch. If Bugs Bunny can make a Wagner opera relatable, then surely we can find ways to make the complex simple, the daunting approachable, and the traditional... well, a bit more fun.

Because at the end of the day, opera—like life—isn’t about understanding every nuance. It’s about feeling something, anything, deeply. And if a cartoon rabbit can help us get there, then maybe, just maybe, we’re on the right track. So go ahead, dive into something new. It might not make sense right away, but that’s half the fun. ??