Bugs breaks the fourth wall and raises his head to address the audience in his normal speaking voice, "Well, what did you expect in an opera?

[6] 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".

[7][8] 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.

[8] Twelve years before the production of What's Opera, Doc?, he had devised a very similar sequence for the cartoon Herr Meets Hare directed by Friz Freleng.

[8][9] 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.

[8] 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.

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.

[4] In August 2017, the online animation journal The Dot and Line published an interview it conducted with Stephen Fossati, who was Jones' "last protégé" and worked with the legendary cartoonist and director from 1993 until his death in 2002.

[4] Fossati in that interview spoke with Erik Vilas-Boas, the co-founder of The Dot and Line, about Jones' "diligence to his craft" and his "relentless perfectionism".

[13] For his 2016 article about the cartoon, one titled "How Bugs Bunny and 'Kill the Wabbit' Inspired a Generation of Opera Stars", Michael Phillips of The Wall Street Journal examined how "a cartoon rabbit and his speech-impaired nemesis" provided many children in 1957 and in the decades thereafter their first, albeit absurd exposure to Wagner's compositions and to the world of opera.

'"[11] Jamie Barton, another notable American mezzo-soprano, also shared with Phillips her reactions to seeing the short for the first time in the mid-1990s, when she was a middle-schooler growing up in Athens, Georgia.

and credited it and Warner Bros.' earlier burlesque short Rabbit of Seville with initially drawing her attention to opera and instilling in her a "love" for classical works, especially the music of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini.

In Canada in 2007, the Toronto Star newspaper featured in its July 8 issue an article by Steve Watt titled "50 glorious years of 'kill da wabbit'".

[15] Watt, a cartoon historian and owner of an animation art gallery in Toronto, discusses in his article the golden anniversary that two days earlier had marked the initial release of the short, and he assesses its continuing popularity.

"[15] He then describes a past event he had organized and held at a Toronto movie theater, where he presented a selection of Chuck Jones' cartoons.

: A few years ago, when I staged a tribute to Chuck and his incredible body of work, showing 15 of his greatest cartoons on the big screen as they were originally meant to be seen, it wasn't "What's Opera, Doc?"

The nearly 500 people in attendance gave their most enthusiastic reaction to the opening credits of "One Froggy Evening" featuring Michigan J. Frog, and "Rabbit of Seville," the famous Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd barbershop ditty.

[15]Such reactions to "the Wagnerian mini epic"[16] a half century after its release once again attest to the cartoon's unique composition and appeal, qualities that were even recognized as "special" in 1957 by some film-industry publications.

For example, the Philadelphia-based journal Motion Picture Exhibitor, which in 1957 had a readership composed largely of theater owners and managers, reviewed the short in August that year and rated it "excellent".

"'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'"[18] and selected it for induction to the National Film Registry, making it the first short cartoon to receive that honor.

[19] One of those professionals was Steve Schneider, a longtime employee of Warner Bros. and an authority on the history of animated productions at the studio and an avid collector of cartoon art.

[7] In Beck's survey, Schneider provides his own assessment of what makes this short so outstanding:From its first images, that of the would-be awesome Fantasia-like figures devolving into the shadow of puny lisping Elmer Fudd, the film piles up pretensions only in order to mow them down.