Pepé Le Pew is an Academy Award-winning fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. A French anthropomorphic skunk that 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 three huge turnoffs to [...]

Porky Pig is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators (particularly Bob Clampett) created many critically acclaimed shorts using the fat little pig. Even after he [...]

Wile E. Coyote (also known simply as “The Coyote”) and the Road Runner are cartoon characters from a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Brothers, while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese. The characters [...]

Sylvester J. Pussycat, Sr., or simply, Sylvester the Cat, or Sylvester is a fictional character, a three-time Academy Award-winning anthropomorphic cat who appears in more than 90 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons made from 1945 to 1966, often chasing Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzales, or Hippety Hopper. The name “Sylvester” is a play on silvestris, the scientific name for the domestic cat species. The character debuted in Friz Freleng’s Life With Feathers (1945). Freleng’s 1947 cartoon Tweetie Pie was the first pairing of Tweety with Sylvester, and the Bob Clampett-directed Kitty Kornered (1946) was Sylvester’s first pairing with Porky Pig.

Tom and Jerry is a series of theatrical short subjects created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that centered on a never-ending rivalry between a housecat (Tom) and a brown mouse (Jerry) whose chases and battles often involved comic violence. Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote and directed one hundred and fourteen Tom and Jerry cartoons at the MGM cartoon studio in Hollywood, California between 1940 and 1957, when the animation unit was closed down. The original series is notable for having won the Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) seven times, tying it with Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies as the most-awarded theatrical animated series.

Wile E. Coyote (also known simply as “The Coyote”) and the Road Runner are cartoon characters from a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Brothers, while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese. The characters went on to star in a long-running series of theatrical cartoon shorts (the first 16 of which were written by Maltese) and the occasional made-for-television cartoon.

Woody Woodpecker is an animated cartoon character, an anthropomorphic woodpecker who appeared in theatrical short films produced by the Walter Lantz animation studio and distributed by Universal Pictures. Though not the first of the screwball characters that became popular in the 1940s, Woody is perhaps the most indicative of the type.