Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures / The Vitaphone Corporation
Short Synopsis
An orange alley cat is fed up with being kicked around: thrown out of a butcher's shop, chased from a house, attacked by a dog. He hits on a solution. He paints a white stripe down his back and douses himself in foul-smelling stuff to pass as a skunk, and it works, everyone keeps away. But it also attracts a real skunk, a lovesick Frenchman who falls for him at first sight. The cat runs; the skunk is always there. The cat climbs a tree, flees into town, grabs a skunk fur and threatens to jump from the top of a silo, then throws the fur down as a decoy, but the skunk isn't fooled. The cat even tries a Bugs Bunny costume, and the skunk pulls off its head. Exhausted, the cat is cornered and cuddled, until the skunk's wife arrives with their two children. The skunk instantly drops his French accent and protests, in plain American, that he was only "wiping a cinder from a lady's eye". She beats him with her umbrella while the cat crawls away to scrub himself clean, deciding he would rather be kicked around than loved by a skunk.
Why It Matters
- The joke that would carry a whole series is already here: a skunk whose romantic confidence is completely immune to his partner's horror, and whose smell everyone but him can see. Chuck Jones's timing of the pursuit, calm on the skunk's side and frantic on the cat's, is the comic engine.
- It is the first appearance of Pepé Le Pew, who became one of Jones's signature characters and won an Academy Award with For Scent-imental Reasons (1949). Unusually, the debut ends by revealing the skunk as a married man with an accent he puts on, a twist later films dropped.
Notes and Trivia
- The skunk is called Henry here; the name Pepé Le Pew came later.
- Jones credited Michael Maltese with helping to create the character's concept.
- See also: Tom Turk and Daffy (1944).