Chilly Willy

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This article is about cartoon character. For the wrestler, see William Jones (wrestler).

Chilly Willy is a fictional cartoon character, a diminutive anthropomorphic penguin, created by Paul J. Smith for the Walter Lantz studio in 1953. The character soon become the second most popular Lantz/Universal character, behind Woody Woodpecker.

Chilly appeared in over 100 theatrical short subjects produced by Lantz from 1953 to 1972, most of which involve his attempts to find food or stay warm, and always meeting opposition from a dog named Smedley (voiced by Daws Butler in his "Huckleberry Hound" voice). Two of Chilly's most notable shorts, I'm Cold (1955) and the Academy Award nominated The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955), were among the final theatrical shorts directed by Tex Avery, who ended his career at the Lantz studio (where he had begun it in the early 1930s).

When the Lantz cartoons were packaged for television in 1957 as The Woody Woodpecker Show, Chilly Willy was a featured attraction on the show, and has remained such in all later versions of the Woody Woodpecker Show package. He appeared in newly produced animation for the first time in twenty-seven years with FOX Kids' The New Woody Woodpecker Show in 1999.

He is a mostly a mute character, although he spoke in his first few cartoons. There were even some cartoons which in the opening credits had him singing his theme song. He also spoke in spin-off comic book series.

His name was probably inspired by the otherwise-unrelated western films character actor Chill Wills.