Pepe Le Pew

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

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 Pepe 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 Pussycat often times 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.

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 Pepe le Moko from Algiers (1938), a remake of the 1937 French film Pepe 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 Pepe was based on Maurice Chevalier.

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