| Pepé Le Pew | |
|---|---|
| Pepé Le Pew, as seen in Little Beau Pepé | |
| First appearance | Odor-able Kitty (released 6 January 1945) |
| Created by | Chuck Jones |
| Voiced by | Mel Blanc Maurice LaMarche (Space Jam, current) Bruce Lanoil (Looney Tunes: Back in Action) |
Pepé Le Pew is an Academy Award-winning fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. A French anthropomorphic skunk that always strolls around in Paris in the springtime, when everyone's thoughts are of love, Pepé is constantly seeking "l'amour" of his own. However, he has three huge turnoffs to any prospective mates: his malodorous scent, the fact that he comes on too aggressively or with too much passion, to both of which he is cheerfully oblivious, and the fact that he can't take 'no' for an answer thinking that the girl is flirting with him.
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Normally, Pepé's romantic interests do include female skunks ("petite femme skunk"), but each episode invariably revolves around Pepé pursuing a "skunk", who, unbeknownst to him, is usually a hapless black cat (retroactively named Penelope Pussycat) who has a white stripe painted down her back (sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidental). While Penelope sometimes reciprocates his amorous feelings, she runs away from him anyway due to his putrid odor.
Chuck Jones, Pepé's creator, wrote that Pepé was based (loosely) on the personality of his Termite Terrace colleague, writer Tedd Pierce, a self-styled "ladies' man" who reportedly always assumed that his infatuations were requited.[1] Pepé's voice, provided by Mel Blanc, was based on Charles Boyer's Pépé le Moko from Algiers (1938), a remake of the 1937 French film Pépé le Moko. Eddie Selzer, animator producer—and Jones' bitterest foe—at Warners then, once commented that no one would laugh at those cartoons. (He actually used a much less pleasant term.)[2] However, this did not keep Selzer from accepting an award for one of Pepé's pictures several years later. There have been theories that Pepé was based on Maurice Chevalier.[3]
In the shorts, a kind of pseudo-French or Franglais is spoken and written primarily by adding "le" to English words (example: "le skunk de pew"), or by more creative mangling of French expressions with English ones, such as "Sacre Maroon!", "my sweet peanut of brittle", "Come to me, my little melon-baby collie!" or "Ah, my little darling, it is love at first sight, is it not, no?" The writer responsible for these malapropisms was Michael Maltese.
Some transcribed Maltese dialogue from the Oscar-winning 1949 short For Scent-imental Reasons:
There is also some dialogue from his first appearance in a Garfield cartoon: Polecat Flats:
Blanc's voice for the character closely resembles the one he used for "Professor Le Blanc", the harried violin instructor on The Jack Benny Program.
Pepe's behavior is not entirely one-sided, as Penelope Pussycat has been shown to actually be attracted to Pepé, trying schemes in several cartoons to rid him of his odor so she can be with him.
The Academy Award-winning 1949 short For Scent-imental Reasons ended with an accidentally painted (and now terrified) Pepé being romantically pursued by a madly smitten Penelope (who has been dunked in dirty water, leaving her with a ratty appearance and a developing head cold, completely clogging up her nose). Penelope locks him up inside a perfume shop, hiding the key down her chest, and proceeds to turn the tables on the now imprisoned and effectively odorless Pepé.
In another short, Little Beau Pepé, Pepé, attempting to find the most arousing cologne with which to impress Penelope, sprays a combination of perfumes and colognes upon himself. This resulted in something close to a love-potion, leading Penelope to fall madly in love with Pepé in an explosion of hearts. Pepé is revealed to be extremely frightened of overly-affectionate women ("But Madame!"), much to his dismay, as Penelope quickly captures him and smothers him in more love than even he could imagine.
And yet again, in Really Scent, Pepé removes his odor by locking himself in a deodorant plant so "Fabrette" (in this instance a black cat with an unfortunate birthmark) would no longer be afraid of him. However, Fabrette (who in this picture is actually attracted to Pepe, but appalled by his odor) had decided to make her odor match her appearance and had locked herself in a Limburger cheese factory. Now more forceful and demanding, Fabrette quickly corners the terrified Pepé, who, after smelling her new stench, wants nothing more than to escape the amorous female cat. Unfortunately, she will not take "no" for an answer and proceeds to chase Pepé off into the distance, with no intention of letting him escape.
Rarely will Pepe make passes at other cats, although two pictures do break the usual formula:
Chuck Jones first introduced the character (originally named Stinky) in the 1945 short Odor-able Kitty. This differs from later entries in several areas: it takes place in an American town rather than Paris; Pepé spends his time in (unknowing) pursuit of a male cat, who has deliberately disguised himself as a skunk for reasons of his own; and in the closing gag, Pepé is revealed to actually be a philandering American skunk named Henry (complete with wife and children!). For the remaining cartoons Jones directed, Pepé retained his accent, nationality, and bachelor status, and the object of his pursuit was always (or nearly always) female.
Pepé, or a slightly altered version of the character, also appears in the Art Davis-directed cartoon Odor of the Day (1948); in this entry, the theme of romantic pursuit is discarded as the skunk (in a nonspeaking role) vies with a male dog for lodging accommodations on a bitterly cold night. This should be noted as one of the only cartoons where the character used his scent-spray as a deliberate weapon: delivered from his tail in a machine gun-like fashion. The other one is Touché and Go, where he frees himself from the jaws of a shark.
Pepé himself made a more obvious cameo in Dog Pounded (1954), where he was attracted to Sylvester after the latter tried to get around a pack of guard dogs by painting a white stripe down his back.
For some unknown reason, Penelope is always mute in these stories; only the self-deluded Pepé speaks.
Pepé was, at one point, integral to the storyline for the movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Originally, once Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and their human co-stars arrived in Paris, Pepé would give them mission briefing inside a gift shop. Perhaps because of the group receiving their equipment in Area 52, Pepé's scene was cut, and in the final film, he only plays a bit part, dressed like a police officer, who tries to help one of the human co-stars (played by Brendan Fraser) after his costar (played by Jenna Elfman) is kidnapped. However, some unused animation of him (and Penelope) appears over the end credits, and his cut scene appears in the movie's print adaptations. Pepé also appears in Space Jam, where his voice has curiously been changed into an approximation of Maurice Chevalier, as opposed to more traditional vocalization.
Pepé occasionally and seldom appeared on Tiny Toon Adventures as the mentor to the character Fifi Le Fume, and also made a cameo appearance in the Histeria! episode "When America Was Young".
In the 1995 animated short Carrotblanca, a parody/homage of the classic film Casablanca, both Pepé and Penelope appear: Pepé (voiced by Greg Burson) as Captain Renault and Penelope (voiced by Tress MacNeille) as "Kitty Ketty", modeled after Ingrid Bergman's performance as Ilsa. Unlike the character's other appearances in cartoons, Penelope (as Kitty) has extensive speaking parts in his film.
Jerry Orbach stated in interviews that when cast as Lumière in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, he based the character's voice and mannerisms on an amalgam of Chevalier's and Pepé's characteristics.
Johnny Depp claims that he drew upon Pepé (along with guitarist Keith Richards) for his characterization of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
In That 70's Show, Kelso says "Jackie hates skunks, except Pepé Le Pew. You gotta admit for a skunk, he's pretty romantic!"
In Loonatics Unleashed, a human descendant of Pepé, called Pierre Le Pew has appeared as one of the villains of the second season of the show. Additionally, Pepé and Penelope Pussycat appear as cameos in a display of Otto the Odd, in the series. In the episode The World is My Circus, Lexi Bunny complains that "this Pepé le Pew look is definitely not me" after being mutated into a skunk-like creature.
Tony Soprano calls his wife Pepe Le Pew, when she talks about a dead women in the series
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