Pepe Le Pew

Pepé Le Pew is a fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. more...

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A French anthropomorphic skunk who 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 two huge turnoffs to any prospective mates: his malodorous scent and the fact that he comes on too aggressively.

Normally, Pepé's romantic interests should 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) that inadvertently gets a white stripe painted down her back. While Penelope often reciprocates his amorous feelings, she runs away from him anyway due to his putrid odor. (Although real skunks exhibit a mild musty scent, they do not smell offensively until they deliberately release the odor, usually in self-protection. Pepé himself has done this.)

Pepé's foul odor and intrusive, aggressive seduction attempts are both traits that many Americans associate to a degree with stereotypical French men, which adds to his resonance. It is also revealed that his odor can be erased by paint - perhaps as a joke to the instinct reaction one would have upon seeing the black and white markings of a skunk.

Character Origin

Chuck Jones, Pepé's creator, says 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. 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.) 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.

In the shorts, a kind of pseudo-French or Franglais is spoken and written primarily by adding "le" to English words, or by more creative mangling of French expressions with English ones, such as "Sacre Maroon!", "my sweet peanut of brittle", or "Ah, my little darling, it is love at first sight, is it not, no?". The writer responsible for these malapropisms was Michael Maltese.

Maltese transcribed some dialog from the Oscar-winning 1949 short "For Scent-imental Reasons":

Skunk: (sings) Affair d'amour? Affair d'coeur? Je ne sais quoi ... je vis en espoir. (Sniffs) Mmmm m mm ... un smella voo feenay ... (Hums)

Gendarme: Le kittee kel terriblay odeur!! Pard'm was ... Jo-seph ... après-midi le fudge is burning!

Proprietor: Allay Gendarme!! Allay!! Return'mwa!! This instonce!! Oh, pauvre mwa, I am ze banrupt ... (Sobs)

Cat: Le mew ? Le purrrrrrr.

Proprietor: A-a-ahhh. Le pussee ferocious! Remove zot skunk! Zot cat-pole from ze premises!! Avec!!

Cat: (Smells skunk) Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff, sniff-sniff.

Skunk: Quel es? ... Ahhh ... la belle femme skunk fatale!! Tch-tch.

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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org