Tweety

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Cartoon Characters

Looney Tunes Characters

First appearance:

''A Tale of Two Kitties'' (November 21, 1942)

Creator:

Robert Clampett (original)Friz Freleng (final redesign)

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#21

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Ranked by 2,987 people

Laura Warman: so cute

Top ranked in this topic:

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety

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Tweety (also known as Tweety Bird and Tweety Pie) is a fictional Yellow Canary in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of a... (more)

Tweety (also known as Tweety Bird and Tweety Pie) is a fictional Yellow Canary in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons. Tweety's popularity, like that of The Tasmanian Devil, actually grew in the years following the dissolution of the Looney Tunes cartoons. The name "Tweety" is a play on words, as it originally meant "sweetie", along with "tweet" being a typical English onomatopoeia for the sounds of birds. Tweety appeared in 48 cartoons in the Golden Age. Despite the perceptions that people may hold, owing to the long lashes and high pitched voice of Tweety, Tweety is male indeed. This was established several times in the series "Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries". On the other hand, his species is ambiguous; although originally and often portrayed as a young canary, he is also frequently called a rare and valuable "tweety bird" as a plot device, and once called "the only living specimen". Nevertheless, the title song directly states that the bird is a canary. His shape more closely suggests that of a baby bird, which in fact is what he was during his early appearances. The yellow feathers were added but otherwise he retained the baby-bird shape. In his early appearances in Bob Clampett cartoons, Tweety is a very agressive character who tries anything to foil his foe, even kicking his enemy when he is down. Tweety was tamed down when Friz Freleng started directing the series into a more cutesy bird, and it hastened even more when Granny was introduced, however sometimes Tweety still kept his malicious side.  Creation by Bob Clampett  thumb|200px|left|Tweety's debut in A Tale of Two Kitties 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 Babbit and Catstello (based on the famous comedians Abbott and Costello). On the original model sheet, Tweety was named Orson (which was also the name of a bird character from an earlier Clampett cartoon Wacky Blackout). Tweety was originally not a domestic canary, but simply a generic (and wild) baby bird in an outdoors nest - naked (pink), jowly, and also 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 documentary 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 two more shorts with the "naked genius", as a Jimmy Durante-ish cat once called him in A Gruesome Twosome. The second Tweety short, Birdy and the Beast, finally bestowed the baby bird with his name. Many of Mel Blanc's characters are known for speech impediments. One of Tweety's most noticeable is that /s/, /k/, and /g/ are changed to /t/, /d/, or (final s) /θ/; for example, "pussy cat" comes out as "putty tat", later rendered "puddy tat", and "sweetie pie" comes out as "tweetie pie", hence his name. He also has trouble with liquid sounds; as with Elmer Fudd, /l/ and /r/ tend to come out as /w/. In Putty Tat Trouble, he begins the cartoon singing a song about himself, "I'm a tweet wittow biwd in a diwded cage; Tweety'th my name but I don't know my age. I don't have to wuwy and dat is dat; I'm tafe in hewe fwom dat ol' putty tat." (Translation: "I'm a sweet little bird in a gilded cage...") Aside from this speech challenge, Tweety's voice (and a fair amount of his attitude) is similar to that of Bugs Bunny, rendered as a child (in The Old Grey Hare, Bugs' infant voice was very similar to Tweety's normal voice), which was achieved by speeding up Mel Blanc's voice recordings of Tweety. Another noticeable thing about Tweety is his occasional and rare habit of transforming into a giant Hyde version of himself, by accidentally consuming Hyde Formula. This was first seen in Hyde and Go Tweet, and happened again in the "London Broiled" episode of The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. Since then, this habit was also used in certain idents of the UK Boomerang channel. Freleng takes over Clampett began work on a short that would pit Tweety against a then-unnamed, lisping black and white cat 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 gave him a cuter appearance, including large blue eyes and yellow feathers. Clampett mentions in Bugs Bunny Superstar that the feathers were added to satisfy censors who objected to the naked bird. The first short to team Tweety and the cat, later named Sylvester, was 1947's Tweetie Pie, which won Warner Bros. its first Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons). Sylvester and Tweety proved to be one of the most notable pairings in animation history.  (less)

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