You can already start to smell the bad jokes. In the words of Danny Cox of the New Orleans Examiner:Sometimes even the cartoon characters you thought were gone for good are brought back to life. And in a big way too.
Warner Bros. is currently developing a live-action/CGI movie (aren't they all?) based on the French animated skunk, Pepe Le Pew from Looney Tunes. Mike Myers (Austin Powers) is attached to voice our foul friend.
The studio is said to be incredibly high on bringing the giant cast of animated characters back to life considering how much money in licensing revenue is used for them each year. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, and Foghorn Leghorn are just a few of the other icons on the Looney Tunes roster.
Jeff Sneider of thewrap.com says:
According to Vulture, only Pepe and his unrequited love interest, Penelope Pussycat, would be CGI characters, while the rest of the film will be live-action, just like "Garfield," "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and the upcoming "Yogi Bear."
Jaime Weisman of Macleans.com points out:
This does give me the opportunity to post this cartoon, which I think would be the only one that could serve as a template for a Pepe Le Pew feature. All the other Pepe cartoons have the stalker/attempted rape issue that Dave Chappelle and others have pointed out. But in this 1959 film, the girl cat is actually as interested in Pepe as he is in her. The problem is that they can’t get together because he smells so terrible that it makes her pass out (for which she’s taunted by June Foray as the narrator: “You are not going to let a little thing like breathing stand in your way?!”). It was written by the great Michael Maltese; oddly, the only cartoon that departs from the usual Pepe formula was not directed by the creator, Chuck Jones, but by one of his animators, Abe Levitow — leading many cartoon buffs to wonder if Jones would have accepted this change-of-pace script if he’d been in the director’s chair.
Weisman is wrong -- there's a similar twist in the Jones-directed "For Scent-imental Reasons," the Oscar-winning third Pepe Le Pew short.
The Macleans article concludes:
WB is planning these projects because their cartoon characters don’t make anywhere near the money in merchandising that the Disney characters do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I will point out something I’ve pointed out elsewhere: Disney, for the most part, allows Mickey and Donald and Goofy cartoons to stay on YouTube. Some of them have been there for years. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers is constantly cracking down on YouTube uploads of Bugs, Daffy and Pepe cartoons. Do they not think Disney cartoons might get some extra merchandising value from the fact that they’re actually there, on the biggest video site in the world, where kids can see them?
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7 comments:
Does Disney actually publish separate merchandising results for its various characters such that anyone could really know that Mickey et al. are doing more than Bugs and Co.?
I'm sure Disney merchandising is huge but it comprises way more than the classic characters.
"Ahh, chérie eez très shag-a-delique, non?"
So my guess is Pepe Le Pew will be CGI and the cat he falls for (don't remember her name) will be live action?? Like Garfield was CGI and Odie was live. Or like they did Alvin and the Chipmunks and Yogi Bear.
Oh, yeah, we all know what a fine job Mike Myers did with the Cat in the Hat.
No thanks. Bleh ...
That stuff about the stalking/attempted "rape" junk in Pepe Le Pew toons is so bogus. I hope the people who talk about it are joking. Pepe was a hopeless romantic who was also a gentleman. He lived for the chase, and the humor in the toons was playful and relatively sophisticated. There's also the fact that when Penelope would turn the tables and pursue him, he ran like hell. So much for the "rape" scenario. Sheesh.
Sigh...Will ANYTHING convince Warner that we still remember the characters? :(
That stuff about the stalking/attempted "rape" junk in Pepe Le Pew toons is so bogus.
The "rape" joke wouldn't be the first time that narcissistic race-paranoid lunatic Chappelle tried tilting at "white pop-culture" windmills and got it forehead-slappingly wrong--
I remember one Comedy Central episode where Chappelle joked about WB being a "racist" network for having a "minstrel Al Jolson character" (meaning Michigan J. Frog from "One Froggy Evening") as their symbol, and looking surprised and none too pleased when the audience booed. Dave, anyone who doesn't know their classic Chuck by heart doesn't deserve to be in comedy. :)
(Pepe only thinks that he is a Great Loveur, which explains why he not only talks like Charles Boyer, but is also named after Pepe le Moko from "Algiers".
And btw, if Warner doesn't have the characters speaking Jones & Maltese's deliberately hideous non-French in the movie, they have no business making it.)
@anonymous#2
Quote: "So my guess is Pepe Le Pew will be CGI and the cat he falls for (don't remember her name) will be live action?? Like Garfield was CGI and Odie was live".
From the article above: "According to Vulture, only Pepe and his unrequited love interest, Penelope Pussycat, would be CGI characters, while the rest of the film will be live-action".
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