With all the problems in the world today, it's amazing that people find time to get outraged about things like six obscure Dr. Seuss books that no one was reading being taken out of print or some episodes of The Muppet Show rerunning with disclaimers. This week's way-outta-scale outrage seems to be about Pepe LePew, a character who during the "Golden Age" of Warner Brothers cartoons appeared in eighteen short cartoons, all of them the same.
And like you, I was amazed to find out that they made eighteen of those things. I thought they made three and just ran them over and over.
I was and am a huge admirer of Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese and the other folks who concocted these cartoons but I think I liked everything else they did more. And I don't think I'm alone in not having a whole lotta love for the horny skunk, even back when date rape was an acceptable subject for humor. Maltese, who wrote the cartoons, wasn't even too fond of him.
I knew Mike a little and I recall him saying something like, "We made one and it went over well so we did it again because that's what we did when something went over well. And then the second one won an Academy Award." That was a distinction which no one in the business thought went to the best cartoon each year — it had more to do with what the guys who ran the studio chose to submit — but when it did, to quote Mike, "We had to keep making them."
The audiences for which they were made laughed at them, as Linda Jones (daughter of Chuck) notes. But I don't think Pepe ever rose to the popularity of other characters her father worked on or others that came out of that studio. When I was growing up, I had Bugs and Daffy and Porky and Tweety and Sylvester and Elmer and Sam and the Road Runner and the Coyote and several of their comrades on my t-shirts and lunchboxes and toy shelf…but only once in a while did you see Pepe.
He didn't even have his own Dell or Gold Key comic book like all the rest of them did at one point or another or always. Every year or three, Pepe might pop up in someone else's comic on a puzzle page or a short back-up story or somewhere but it was extremely rare. I suspect one reason was that no one knew what to do with him. Okay, so he chases around a female black cat that happened to get a white streak painted on its back. What's the plot of the next issue?
One of his few appearances in comics of the preceding century was a one-panel cameo in an issue of Bugs Bunny that I wrote for the Gold Key line back in 1975. It was a story about Elmer Fudd deciding to join the French Foreign Legion and I think I only wrote it because I thought it would be funny to have Elmer keep saying "Fwench Foweign Wegion." Speech impediments were funnier then too. Here is that one panel from "Beau Fudd"…
I'm not sure if it was on this story or one other one I wrote that had a three-panel cameo of Pepe but it was a hassle getting him in there. When my editor at Gold Key, Del Connell, saw I'd put Pepe into the script, he said, "Pepe LePew? We haven't used him in years! I don't think we even have a model sheet for what he looks like." I suggested that maybe they oughta have one.
As I mentioned back in this post, the Warner Brothers studio wasn't actively producing new cartoons then. There were however folks there in charge of supervising what was done with their characters, merchandise-wise. Del called them and asked for some reference on Pepe. According to him, they said, "Oh, we don't have any. There's not enough interest in that character these days."
Fortunately, the artist on that particular comic book I wrote was Tom McKimson, who'd worked for the cartoon studio and he remembered…kind of. So we stuck Pepe in the comic and as far as I could tell, nobody cared. That's the character that some people are now furious is being "canceled."
When DC Comics later took over issuing comic books of Bugs and Friends, they did a few short stories of Pepe and I gave him a cameo in a Superman/Bugs Bunny crossover series I wrote for them. But I think at that point, Pepe was just appearing to see if there was any merchandising potential in the character…and apparently, there wasn't.
I am against losing great work because someone somewhere might take offense to it. But when things go away because they haven't aged well or no one really cares about them anymore…well, that's not a hill on which I choose to die or even suffer a slight scratch on.
Not everything that was funny then is funny now. I don't think drunks are as funny as they used to be. I know most of the racist gags of the thirties and forties — jokes of the Mantan Moreland variety — don't bring down the house the way they used to. And given the changes in fashion and in how we view adult sexuality, I don't think your basic man-in-a-dress, as practiced by Milton Berle, Flip Wilson and the movie Some Like It Hot, is the sure-fire laugh-getter it once was.
And I don't think the amorous M. LePew skipping after some terrified pussycat was ever that funny…and it's even less so now. I'm against giving in to pressure groups that scream about things they don't understand. If this was my government banning something, I'd be out on the Capitol dressed like the QAnon Shaman, trying to occupy Nancy Pelosi's office. (Well, no, I wouldn't…)
But when a company that owns something decides there's no market for it at the moment, I'm okay with that, just as long as the material still exists somewhere. I'm not sure there ever was that much of a market for Pepe.