Sexual awakening and culture wars: How Lola Bunny broke the internet one wet dream at a time

At the time, Lola was reportedly introduced to bring more “balance” to the male-heavy Looney Tunes cast with an additional objective of creating more lucrative merchandising opportunities. After Space Jam, the character spent years at a stretch appearing only in cameos—later surfacing as a tomboy lead in Baby Looney Tunes (voiced by Britt McKillip), a typical trainwreck gen Zer in The Looney Tunes Show (voiced by Kristen Wiig), an invisible potion-making perfumer in Looney Tunes: Rabbits Run (voiced by Rachel Ramras) and happy-go-lucky sidekick in New Looney Tunes (marking Space Jam’s original voice actress Kath Soucie’s return to the franchise).

Although Lola underwent huge personality overhauls in all of her appearances following Space Jam, each of the media mentioned above received its own share of criticisms from fans who were hung up on the character’s original eyelid-batting debut.

For many, Lola—dripped in an impractical basketball costume that “left very little to the imagination”—was the cartoon animal responsible for their sexual awakenings. With every other subreddit, Twitter and TikTok hashtag, NSFW furry art, GIF, Wattpad smut fanfiction, hentai edit, Etsy resin figurine, speedrun, Pornhub roleplay, YouTube Poop, video game skin and, of course, fursuit, making its much-awaited and questionably-warm-welcomed debut on the internet, horny fans of the characters continue to imagine themselves quite literally at it like rabbits with Lola even to this day in 2022. There goes another sentence I never thought I’d pen down in my entire life.

Now, it’s a known fact that women have been hypersexualised in the media for centuries—the animation industry is no different. The 1930s witnessed the rise of Betty Boop, a coy, garter-wearing flapper woman with a baby face who often falls prey to rule 34 of the internet (also known as if it exists, there is porn of it).

Then, in 1940, Disney introduced Cleo, the first—and hopefully the last—‘sexy’ pet goldfish with unrealistic ideals like doe eyes, curled lashes and an unquenchable thirst for kisses. The list also includes “cartoon bombshell” Jessica Rabbit, Roger Rabbit’s toon human wife who is reimagined as a sultry-but-moral actress and singer in the 1988 hybrid feature film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

“You don’t know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do,” Jessica is heard saying in a scene as private investigator Eddie Valiant replies with a “You don’t know how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.” Peak 1980s energy… right?

Lola, Angelina Jolie’s hourglassed character from the 2004 family adventure movie Shark Tale, is yet another example, with her supposedly manipulative femme fatale features leveraged to render her personality as nothing more than shallow and superficial. Another noteworthy star on the bottomless list is Sandy Cheeks from SpongeBob SquarePants—who was designed with a single bra, whereas in reality, squirrels have around ten nipples. So if Sandy’s bikini was really essential to the kid’s entertainment series, she would have sported five bras in total.

Although intended for children below the age of 13, it can’t be denied that all of these characters were created from the male gaze, for the male gaze. That being said, however, it’s also worth noting how some of them, Betty Boop for example, have a liberative layer to their no-nonsense personalities—though this aspect is blatantly masked by stereotypical femininity aimed to, in turn, ease their journey into becoming sex symbols.

In Lola Bunny’s case, the cartoon basketball player’s initial debut came during the peak of the ‘sex bunny’ phenomenon that kicked off following Hugh Hefner’s inception of the Playboy Mansion and the concept of ‘Playmates’ in the mid-1950s. The trend then reportedly climaxed in the 1990s with the vibrating sex toy Rampant Rabbit’s popularisation by a viral episode of HBO’s Sex and the City.

Fast forward to 2022, the sex bunny phenomenon can either be manifested as cutthroat-expensive fursuits or free-to-use Snapchat filters. This effortless evolution of the phenomenon, however, has been significantly impacted by Lola Bunny’s 2021 makeover. Or should I say, makeunder.

It was Thursday 4 March 2021 that Lola’s fictosexual fanbois were first hit with the shocking news. Having waited for Space Jam: A New Legacy (the sequel of the 1996 hit film) since its official announcement in February 2014, much of the internet was anticipating the LeBron James-starrer which marked Lola’s busty return to the big screen.

But alas, when Entertainment Weekly published the first look of the upcoming movie, the set of promotional images featured a redesigned version of Lola.

Gone were her hourglass figure, thigh-riding shorts and midriff-baring crop top. Instead, Lola was reincarnated sans breasts—dressed in comparatively baggier and practical basketball gear, even going as far as wearing compression leggings under her track shorts.

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“Lola was very sexualised, like Betty Boop mixed with Jessica Rabbit,” director Malcolm D. Lee told Entertainment Weekly at the time, adding that her old design was “not politically correct” and “unnecessary.” He continued, “This is 2021. It’s important to reflect the authenticity of strong, capable female characters… So we reworked a lot of things, not only her look, like making sure she had an appropriate length on her shorts and was feminine without being objectified, but gave her a real voice. For us, it was, ‘Let’s ground her athletic prowess, her leadership skills, and make her as full a character as the others’.”

Simply put, in Space Jam: A New Legacy, Lola was intended to be more than just a marketing ploy. She was finding her own footing in the Tune Squad, away from Bugs’ iron-board-stiffening simping. And that’s exactly what hit a nerve with Lola’s, dare I say, horndog fans.

With comments like “Damn what have they done to our fury goddess?” “Communist China has won. Liberty is dead,” and “Oh great, they may as well just call this #WokeJam,” enthusiasts immediately took to social media platforms to start a culture war based on the latest visual hindrance to their wet dreams. They genuinely believed the left-wing had seized control over Warner Bros. and routinely blamed ‘cancel culture’ for drawing lines over a children’s film.

On the other end, the discourse also sparked opinions on what it means to be a “strong female character.” Did Lola really have to get her breasts sanded down to be perceived more seriously? Heck, did the animators have to remove her knees in the process too?

Many argued that Lola’s ‘desexualisation’ perpetuates yet another stereotype that women can’t be sexy and athletic at the same time. Proof of this can be traced back to a 2016 Vox article which mentioned how Serena Williams, during the 2015 French Open, was “compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive.”

In fact, animation director Tony Cervone once explained that Lola was originally intended to be more of a “tomboy,” but the production team feared that she would appear “too masculine” and chose to emphasise her “feminine attributes” instead. Way to go, team!

With trends like Lola Chungus (the viral Big Chungus edit of the character in question) nearly fizzling out as we speak, Lola Bunny’s controversial redesign is increasingly being buried under NSFW fanart and recreations of fresh characters like Judy Hopps from Disney’s 2016 animated feature film, Zootopia.

While the Space Jam series, at its core, is about teamwork, friendship, and the power of setting your mind on a goal and working hard to achieve the same, it has now become a case study on how its only female character fails to overpower its native depiction rooted in hypersexuality—as she firmly states “don’t ever call me ‘doll’,” while everyone continues to do just that.

A case study everyone fails to learn from even today, to be more specific.