Originally released to theaters by Warner Bros. on July 6, 1957, ''What's Opera, Doc?
required about six times as much work and expense as any of the other six-minute cartoons his production unit was turning out at the time. Jones admitted as much, having described a surreptitious re-allocation of production time to complete the short. During the six minutes of What's Opera, Doc?'', Jones lampoons
Disney's
Fantasia, the contemporary style of ballet, Wagner's perceived ponderous operatic style, and even the by-then clichéd Bugs-and-Elmer formula. In his autobiography
Chuck Amuck, Jones singled out ''What's Opera, Doc?'' "for sheer production quality, magnificent music and wonderful animation, this is probably our (unit's) most elaborate and satisfying production".
Story development and layout Michael Maltese wrote the parody's storyline and, in collaboration with Chuck Jones, the comedic lyrics set to Wagner's music, including the
duet "Return My Love". Some elements of the cartoon drew upon previous animated works at Warner Bros. Maltese himself had originated the concept of depicting Bugs in Valkyrie-styled
drag and mounted on a fat horse. That anti-
Nazi short was released by Warner Bros. to American theaters in January 1945, just several months before
Germany's surrender to
Allied forces in
World War II. Wearing a blonde braided wig under a medieval horned helmet and carrying a shield, Bugs in that earlier film rides across the screen to the tune of "Pilgrim's Chorus", a selection from Wagner's 1845 opera
Tannhäuser. The highly stylized backdrops and entire color scheme for ''What's Opera, Doc?'' were done by art director
Maurice Noble and were reportedly so "daring" at the time that the production's overall design "sent the studio into a
tizzy". Noble later remarked, "They thought I was
bats when I put that bright red on Elmer with those purple skies". According to him, some employees in Warner's Ink and Paint Department assumed that a variety of color specifications he sent to them were errors. Staff, Noble recalled, would ask questions such as "'You really mean you want that magenta red on that?' And I said, 'Yes, that's the way.'"
Missing sound effect During the final editing of the short, a "tiny sound effect" was omitted from the master footage, an omission that for decades continued to disturb
Chuck Jones whenever he viewed the cartoon after its initial release. In August 2017, the online animation journal
The Dot and Line published an interview it conducted with Stephen Fossati, who was Jones' "last
protégé", working with him from 1993 until his death in 2002. Fossati in that interview spoke with Eric Vilas-Boas, the co-founder of
The Dot and Line, about Jones' "diligence to his craft" and his "relentless perfectionism". With regard to the absent sound effect, Vilas-Boas quoted Fossati's comments about his
mentor's 45-year obsession with that "minuscule" detail in the film: ==History==