Vintage Bugs Bunny Postage Stamp T-Shirt 90s

This isn’t a cartoon graphic dressed up to look like a stamp — it’s a reproduction of a real one. In 1997, the USPS put Bugs Bunny on an actual 32-cent commemorative stamp, kicking off the Postal Service’s “Stampers” youth program in an attempt to get kids interested in stamp collecting again. The design here reprints that exact stamp: Bugs leaning on a mailbox with a carrot in hand, rolling farmland behind him, full perforated border and all, marked “TM & © 1997 U.S.P.S.” and “TM & © 1997 Warner Bros.” on a Warner Bros. Studio Store tee, made in the USA.

The stamp wasn’t universally welcomed. One newspaper editor at the time called it “a new low in commercializing and trivializing” the Postal Service’s stamp program — putting a cartoon rabbit on the same medium that had carried presidents and war heroes struck plenty of people as beneath the office. A USPS spokesperson pushed back, arguing Bugs had become a genuine piece of American cultural history in his own right.

Whatever the controversy, the gamble worked. The Bugs Bunny stamp was wildly popular, and USPS followed it with four more Looney Tunes stamps over the next several years — Sylvester and Tweety, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, and finally Porky Pig, who closed the series out with “That’s all Folks!”

A cartoon that got the government’s stamp of approval, literally.