In the Cartoon Character’s Hall of Fame, very few have had quite the same impact as one named Bugs Bunny. Whether you watched his cartoons in the early decades of the 20th century, or lived to see him play basketball with Michael Jordan in Space Jam, the tales of the witty rabbit escaping his demise from characters such as Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil have captivated people for nearly a century. Why am I bringing up Bugs Bunny in a Yu-Gi-Oh! article? Well you see, Bugs Bunny frequently has to face foes with dangerous guns, jagged teeth, and sharp claws. As natural selection would have it, Bugs Bunny has none of those, so instead of fighting battles with his strength, Bugs relies more on his wits. In an episode with the Tasmanian Devil, Bugs Bunny acts like a salesman to try and convince the devil why eating him isn’t a good idea. One of his staple tricks is to argue with someone, switch to their stance, and trick them into arguing for his side. Surprisingly this works.

Much like Bugs Bunny, Yugi Muto is a high school student who constantly has to stand up to bullies wielding knives and raw muscles. Well aware of his physical inadequacies, Yugi prefers games that challenge his mind rather than his body. Using the power of an ancient Egyptian artifact called the Millennium Puzzle, Yugi unleashes the power of an ancient spirit and challenges these bullies to Shadow Games. If they do not comply with the rules of said game, the bully shall receive a Penalty Game, which usually comes in the form of a cursing. By harnessing this shadow magic, Yugi can stand a chance against these bullies by using his wits rather than his strength. Of all the weapons Yugi’s enemies have possessed, at least none of them have wielded a gun…until now.

Burger World

It’s the end of another day at Domino High School. Jonouchi turns to Yugi and asks if he wants to get something to eat on their way home.

“How about the new Burger World that opened in Domino City?” suggests Yugi.

Anzu overhears their conversation and says Yugi can’t go there because the food has been making people sick. Yugi suggests they go to Calorie Burger instead and asks Anzu if she wants to come.

“Sorry, I have chores to do today, and anyway, didn’t you hear the teacher? There’s an escaped convict running around. We have to go straight home!”

After Anzu leaves the classroom, Jonouchi starts to get suspicious of her.

“Hasn’t Anzu been acting strange lately,” he asks.

“Now that you mention it, she hasn’t walked home with us recently.” Jonouchi thinks Anzu is doing escort services, so they decide to follow her into the city. They follow her into the red light district until, to their surprise, she enters the new Burger World. (Fun fact: Burger World has also employed George Newman from UHF and Beavis and Butthead.) Yugi and Jonouchi are confused until suddenly she pops out in a waitress uniform to greet them. (Wow, she sure changed quickly.)

Anzu slowly backs into the restaurant. Now that her friends know she works here, she’s busted. After school jobs are against school rules. If that blabber-mouth Jonouchi tells, she’ll be expelled!

Yugi and Jonouchi sit down inside the restaurant. Yugi starts to think they shouldn’t have come when Anzu slaps down a tray of burgers.

“Please enjoy our burgers with plenty of our famous ketchup!” says Anzu as she squirts out the words: TELL AND YOU DIE.

Jonouchi tells her to cool it, and then Anzu seeems to have a drastic change in demeanor. She tells her friends that she got this job so she can study dance in New York after she graduates.

“Don’t worry, Anzu, we won’t tell on you!” says Jonouchi, “I’ll eat 10,000 of these burgers if I tell!”

The Escaped Convict

If this story sounds familiar to you so far, that’s probably because you remember it from the anime. In Episode 22, which is the first part of Yugi vs Kaiba at Duelist Kingdom, Anzu has a flashback to the time when Yugi and Jonouchi found out she worked at a restaurant. However, this is as far as the manga and the anime are similar. In the English dub, a guy tries to rob Téa at school. In the Japanese version, the guy doesn’t try to rob her, but attempts to sexually harass her. In both scenarios, Yugi comes to bust the guy and Téa/Anzu out of trouble. As dark as both of those events are, none of them come close to what actually happens in the manga.

Anzu returns to the front door to greet another customer.

“Welcome! Are you by yourself?” asks Anzu.

I’m by myself all right, that’s why I’m so lonely,” says the customer. Out of nowhere, he pulls out a gun and points it at Anzu.

“Awright, anyone makes a sound and the girl dies!” he shouts.

“Anzu!” cries Yugi.

“It’s the escaped prisoner!” cries another customer.

The prisoner orders Anzu to blindfold herself with the ribbon she has tied in her hair, then he sets her down at a table. Next, he points his gun at Yugi and orders him to bring booze and cigarettes, calling him a “wussy little one.”

“Everyone else get down on the floor and close your eyes,” he orders, “If any one of you moves an inch, this girl is dead!”

As Yugi comes carrying a tray of Lucky Stripes and Vodka, Anzu realizes that the prisoner was referring to Yugi earlier when he said “wussy little one.”

“Yugi, it’s you, isn’t it?” cries Anzu, “Stay back, it’s too dangerous.”

“Shut your damn mouth!” yells the prisoner, as he slaps her on the cheeck.

Seeing his friend getting hurt causes Yugi to transform into his alter-ego. He sits down opposite to the prisoner and challenges him to a game, the loser of which will die. Considering himself to be extremely lucky, the prisoner decides to amuse himself by listening to Yugi’s challenge.

As Anzu remains blindfolded, she listens to the person who is trying to save her. His voice sounds like Yugi’s, but more confident. She isn’t sure who the voice belongs to.

Yugi explains that the rules are to choose one of your ten fingers, and only that finger can move, the rest must remain completely still. The prisoner chooses his index finger, the one that’s already on the trigger of his gun. Yugi chooses his thumb. They don’t specify right or left, but based on the pictures, we can see that the prisoner chooses his right index finger, and Yugi chooses his right thumb.

“After the signal to start, we are free to do anything,” says Yugi, “Game Start.”

“And in one instant, it’s game over!” says the prisoner as he prepares to squeeze the trigger of his gun, but before he fires the shot, Yugi uses his thumb to ignite a lighter.

“Right, I forgot to ask for a lighter,” says the prisoner, “Okay, the last thing you can do is use your thumb to light my cigarette. I’ll kill you after that!”

So Yugi uses the lighter to light the prisoner’s cigarette…then he places the lighter on the back side of the prisoner’s left hand…which is currently pouring vodka. If the prisoner makes the slightest movement, the lighter will fall and set the vodka on fire, and now that the vodka is overflowing onto the prisoner’s lap…well, I think you can see where that will go.

“You can keep the lighter! Take it with you…to hell!” says Yugi as he grabs Anzu by the arm and pulls her away.

The prisoner remains stunned, betrayed by his lucky streak, as the lit cigarette falls out of his mouth, and…

(I did warn you this would end dark.)

Anzu removes her blindfold to see who her savior is, but all she sees is Yugi in his regular form.

“Who was that man who saved me?” thinks Anzu, “I’ll never forget that voice. After all, I’ve fallen in love with it’s owner!”

Thoughts: Looney Tunes and Yu-Gi-Oh!

One more thing I remember Bugs Bunny doing in his cartoons is plugging up a real gun with his finger, and that would cause the gun to backfire. Here in this chapter, we have a similar far-fetched scenario where Yugi places a lighter on the back of someone’s hand and expects it to not fall off, and also expects the prisoner to just sit there and not risk moving it off his hand. And by that means, Yugi defeats a guy with a gun by using a lighter. Also, since Yugi used his thumb to ignite the ligther, he can legitimately say, “I killed a man with this thumb.”

It is very reasonable to assume that Kazuki Takahashi was inspired by Looney Tunes and incorporated its themes into his story. The biggest evidence of this is Maxamillian Pegasus’s archetype of Toon monsters, also when he aknowledges that “Funny Bunny” is his favorite cartoon. If you have seen the anime, you should be able to tell that Funny Bunny is a parody of Bugs Bunny because he is constantly outwitting a hunter. Not only that, but Seto Kaiba uses cards in bizzare ways, such as blocking the trigger of a gun or knocking a remote out of someone’s hand. That said, the Looney Tunes-esque bizzareness is far from over in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series.

One more connection that I have made to this particular chapter is that this scenario seems fairly familiar to the poison scene from The Princess Bride. There is a villainous man holding a blindfolded woman hostage and a mysterious man trying to save her through a battle of wits. Both games include alcohol, a table, and one player ending up dead. Could Kazuki Takahashi have been inspired by The Princess Bride as well? We know that Takahashi is obsessed with games and very much enjoys the idea of “death games” (although I’m sure he wouldn’t want to play one). I don’t think Takahashi was heavily influenced by The Princess Bride, but it is likely he saw this movie at least once and completely geeked out over the “poison death game” and decided to recreate it in his own death game manga series.

In addition to these connections, this chapter is the first time we see Yugi’s possible hidden crush for Anzu. Also, we see Anzu falling in love with “the one who saved her with a game,” whose identity she does not yet know. Will she find out one day? Keep following my blog for more Yu-Gi-Oh! manga reviews!

Old Version: “I Killed a Man with this Thumb!”: Yu-Gi-Oh! Chapter 4 Review