World Cartoon

Tweety

World Cartoon - Tweety. Tweety (aka Tweety Pie or Tweety Bird) is a fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons. Fairly popular during the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Tweety's popularity, like that of The Tasmanian Devil, actually grew in the years following the dissolution of the Looney Tunes cartoons. Today, Tweety is considered, along with Taz and Bugs Bunny, among the most popular of the Looney Tunes characters, especially (because of his "cute" appearance and personality) among girls and young women. Despite widespread speculation to the contrary, Tweety is and has always been a male character.


Creation

Bob Clampett created the character that would become Tweety in the 1942 short A Tale of Two Kitties, pitting him against two hungry cats named Babbott and Catstello (based on the famous comedians Abbott and Costello).

Tweety was originally naked (pink), jowly, and far more aggressive and saucy, as opposed to the later, more well-known version of him as a less hot-tempered (but still somewhat ornery) yellow canary. In the movie Bugs Bunny, Superstar, animator Clampett stated, in a sotto voce "aside" to the audience, that Tweety had been based "on my own naked baby picture". Clampett did three more shorts with the "naked genius", as a Jimmy Durante-ish cat once called him in Gruesome Twosome. The last of these, Birdy and the Beast, finally bestowed the baby bird with his name.

Many of Mel Blanc's characters are notable for speech impediments. Tweety's comes from having a beak, with no lips or teeth. Thus he has trouble saying certain words, especially ones with "dental" sounds. For example, "pussy cat" comes out as "putty tat" or "puddy tat", and "sweetie pie" comes out as "tweetie pie", although it is doubtful he ever actually called himself by that name on-screen. Aside from this speech challenge, Tweety's voice (and a fair amount of his attitude) is similar to that of Bugs Bunny.


Tweety & Sylvester

Clampett began work on a short that would pit Tweety against a then-unnamed black and white cat lisping created by Friz Freleng in 1945. However, Clampett left the studio before going into full production on the short, and Freleng took on the project. Freleng toned Tweety down and cutsied him up, giving him large blue eyes and yellow feathers. The first short to team Tweety and the cat, later named Sylvester, was 1947's Tweety Pie, which won Warner Bros. its first Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons).

The pairing of Sylvester and Tweety was one of the most notable pairings in animation history Most of their cartoons followed a standard formula:

* The hungry "puddy tat" wanting to eat the bird, some major obstacle stands in his way – usually Granny or her bulldog Hector (or, more often than not, numerous bulldogs).

* Tweety says his signature lines ("I tawt I taw a puddy tat!" and "I did, I did taw a puddy tat!").

* Sylvester spending the entire film using progressively more elaborate schemes or devices to capture his meal. Of course, each of his tricks fail, either due to their flaws or, more often than not, because Tweety steers the enemy cat towards Hector the Bulldog, an indignant Granny (voiced by Bea Benaderet and later June Foray), or other device (such as off the ledge of a tall building or steering him into an oncoming train).


Later appearances

During the 1990s, Tweety also starred in an animated TV series called The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, in which Granny ran a detective agency with the assistance of Tweety, Sylvester and Hector. In 2003, a younger version of him premiered on Baby Looney Tunes.

Tweety appeared in an early 1990s public service announcement, warning parents of the dangers of boiling temperature bath water.

In the TV series Tiny Toon Adventures, Tweety appeared in several episodes as the mentor of Sweetie Pie.

Tweety Cartoon