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Pepé Le Pew

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

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.

Relationship with Penelope Pussycat

In recent years, the shorts featuring his character have been more and more downplayed and even banned as his relentless pursuit of clearly unappreciative females comes across more as stalking and/or sexual harassment.

However the behavior is not entirely one-sided as Penelope Pussycat has been shown to actually be very much in love with Pepé, trying several schemes to rid him of his odor so she can capture 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, giving her a ratty appearance). 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 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, 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 Penelope would no longer be afraid of him. However, Penelope had a similar plan, and locked herself in a limburger cheese factory to make herself stinky. Now more forceful and demanding, Penelope quickly captured the terrified Pepé, who, after smelling Penelope's new stench, wanted nothing more than to escape the amorous female cat. Unfortunately, Penelope would not take "no" for an answer and proceeded to chase Pepé off into the distance, with no intention of letting him escape.

Character History

Chuck Jones first introduced the character in 1945 in 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 (replete 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 Arthur Davis-directed cartoon Odor of the Day (1948); in this entry, the theme of romantic pursuit is discarded as the skunk vies with a male dog for accommodations on a bitterly cold night. This should be noted as the only cartoon within which the character used his scent-spray as a deliberate weapon: delivered from his tail in a machine gun-like fashion.

Pepé Cartoons in France

In the French version of Pepé le Pew, Pépé le putois, Pépé is an Italian skunk with a strong Italian accent. Most of the dialog is in French, though some Italian words and expressions are also used, such as, mon petit farfalle, mon petit ravioli e pesto when talking to the cat, or c'est le moment de la mise amore. In some previous dubbings, his voice was based on typically French actor and seducer Yves Montand.

Most Recent Appearances

Johnny Depp drew upon Pepé (along with guitarist Keith Richards) for his characterization of Captain Jack Sparrow in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

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 his more traditional vocalization.

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.

See also

Filmography of Pepé Le Pew

File:Pepe Le Pew.JPG
Pepé Le Pew and Brendan Fraser in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Quotes

"(Singing to the tune of "I've Been Working On The Railroad") The arms of Pepé are about you, all the day live long. The lips of Pepé are upon you. (Kisses the cat a few times) Pepé's love is strong. (The cat runs off, Pepé holds onto her and is dragged along) Darling can't you hear me asking, you're going now to where? (Pepé bumps into a pole and loses his grip on the cat) Do you think she's gone and left me?"


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