Who Censored Roger Rabbit [Mass Market Paperback]

Gary K. Wolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1982

“Who’d want to kill a dumb cartoon bunny?”
That’s what Eddie Valiant wants to know. He’s the toughest private eye in Los Angeles, and he’ll handle anything – if you’re human. If you’re a Toon, that’s another story.
Eddie doesn’t like Toons – those cartoon characters who live side-by-side with humans. Not the way they look, and especially not the way they talk: word-filled balloons come out of their mouths and then disintegrate, leaving dust all over his rug.
Eddie will work for a Toon if his cash supply is low enough. So he reluctantly agrees when Roger Rabbit, a Toon who plays straight man (or should that be straight rabbit) in the Baby Herman cartoon series, asks him to find out who’s been trying – unsuccessfully – to buy his contract from the DeGreasy Brothers syndicate.
Then Rocco DeGreasy is murdered – and Roger is the prime suspect! The rabbit is also, as Eddie soon discovers, very, very dead.
Who censored Roger Rabbit? And who shot Rocco DeGreasy? Was it Roger, or was it Rocco’s hot-cha-cha girlfriend, Jessica Rabbit? Why had Jessica – a pretty steamy number for a Toon – ever married a dopey bunny in the first place? And why does everybody want Roger’s battered old teakettle?
As Eddie combs L.A. from the executive suites of the DeGreasy Brothers to Sid Sleaze’s porno comic studio, he uncovers art thefts, blackmail plots….and the cagiest killer he’s ever faced.
In Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, author Gary K. Wolf has created a wonderfully skewed – and totally believable – world compounded of equal parts Raymond Chandler, Lewis Carroll, and Warner Brothers. This riotously surreal spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel is packed with action and laughs. From first page to last, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is shear delight.
Celebrated author Gary K. Wolf’s cult classic and highly praised novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is the basis for the blockbuster Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg Academy Award winning film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 12, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345303253
• ISBN-13: 978-0345303257
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,107,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not the movie, but just as good, July 5, 2002

By 

Dennis Laycock (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Who Censored Roger Rabbit (Mass Market Paperback)

I first saw the movie based on this book, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," in 1988. I loved it, and after many repeat video viewings it became my No. 1 favorite movie of all time, and remains so to this day. I still catch new jokes everytime I watch (now on DVD).

Well, I finally decided to read this book. One thing's for sure, It's Not the Movie. Eddie Valiant, Roger, Jessica and Baby Herman are still here, but only their basic character traits (Eddie's alcoholism, Jessica's buxomness) are the same. The movie-makers adapted just one line of dialogue for the movie (Baby Herman's "I've got a 50-year-old lust and a 3-year-old dinky").

That's where the similarities end. This book deals with comic strip actors, not cartoon actors. When the 'toons speak, they make word balloons that very creatively reflect their emotions, and can be manipulated physically as well. Additional characters include a comic strip photographer, brother owners of a cartoon syndicate, a porn-cartoon syndicate owner, and a ton of colorful cameos.

The book touches more on the human/'toon discrimination hinted at in the movie, but not much. Rather, it's just a good ol' fashioned Sam Spade-esque simile-rich read that enthralled me page by page. Warning: those familiar with the simple, sweet Roger from the movie may be a little shocked by the ending!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darker than the film, March 18, 2007

By 

Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who censored Roger Rabbit? (Hardcover)

This is the cult classic which inspired the film "Who framed Roger Rabbit" but the original book is much darker and more adult in tone than the film - and in spite of the fact that half the characters are "toons," much less cartoonish.

This is set in an alternative Hollywood in which cartoon characters or "toons" are real. Unlike the film however, they are neither industructible nor immortal. In the book, a toon can generate a temporary "doppelganger" duplicate of himself or herself, and these expendable copies are used as stunt doubles for all the dangerous or lethal work in films. A toon in this book who is hit by a bullet will die just as easily as a human.

The narrator and central character is P.I. Eddie Valiant - Bob Hoskin's character in the film. Other characters who were translated recognisably to the film from the book include cartoon comedy star Roger Rabbit, his humanoid toon wife Jessica Rabbit, and toon star Baby Herman.

As in the film, Eddie Valiant is hired by Roger Rabbit for a number of reasons including marital problems - in the book his beautiful wife Jessica has left him for his agent, Rocco DeGreasy. Roger wants her back, and believes Rocco has put pressure on her to leave him. At first he seems to be talking nonsense.

But a few chapters into the book, both Roger and Rocco are murdered. The police - human and toon divisions - think Roger killed his agent and Jessica murdered him in revenge. Shortly before he died Roger Rabbit created a doppelganger; this double persuades Eddie Valiant to look for evidence that both Jessica and his late self were innocent of the murders.

Eddie sets out to clear Roger and Jessica - with zany results.

A clever black comedy - well worth a read. The film was technically brilliant, but this original is a much cleverer story.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A rare case where the film was better, October 21, 2010

By 

Michael Scott - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Kindle Edition)

Caveat emptor: aside from the story setting -- a world in which humans and Toons coexist in the real world -- and a handful of character names, this book has pretty much nothing to do with the film WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?

The book is not particularly well-written. It's not awful, but it's just not very good. The majority of it goes like this: our detective narrator, Eddie Valiant, gets Character 1's side of the story. He then goes to Character 2 and repeats this story to them. Character 2 balks and tells him a different version of the story. Valiant returns to Character 1, reviews the story as Character 1 told it and then tells Character 1 what Character 2 had to say about all this and this happens over and over again, getting pretty tedious after a while. Wolf/Valiant never skip past with a "I told him the information I got from the girl," it's always reiterated in complete detail. The book could probably be cut by half just by removing overly redundant detail, but then I guess we wouldn't get all the descriptions of what the Toons' word bubbles look like. (In this version, the Toons are comic strip Toons, not movie Toons.)

Valiant is a pushover -- he'll believe whatever anyone says to him until someone else contradicts it, and then he'll believe THEM at face value until further notice. This would be funny if it were being played that way, with Valiant being a too-nice poseur of a P.I., but the book seems to think it's presenting him as being appropriately hardnosed. Several times it's noted that he is a former Marine and he's constantly drinking some kind of alcoholic beverage -- in a world where Toons are living breathing creatures, it's a little sad that the author seems to have spent the bulk of his creative efforts in coming up with a new metaphor to describe Valiant taking a drink every time he does so.

There's an attempt to make humans vs. Toons some kind of racial allegory. Their police forces are segregated, with humans handling human cases and Toons handling Toons exclusively, and there's a brief and pointless scene where Eddie's weekly poker game bails on him when Roger shows up ("That was the deal: no women and no Toons"). But this is never really explored, or much utilized, it's just kind of a superficial gloss over the proceedings. Eddie is clearly different because he doesn't mind Toons as much, but the book never goes into why, just occasionally pats him on the head for being such a good guy on the inside.

The plot is kind of all over the place and contains no fewer than three flagrant deus ex machinas in the third act. The formatting was decent in the Kindle edition but there were some OCR errors and a new character's dialogue does not always start a new paragraph. The characters don't have distinct voices and it can be momentarily confusing, and when this happens repeatedly over the course of the entire book, it becomes a little aggravating.

I give it one star for being readable, another star for a great concept, and a third star for inspiring a film that did a much better job of leveraging the concept and its opportunities. It's $2, so it's not a big financial loss if you get curious and pick it up, but you could probably find better things to do with your time.