Ba-dee, dee, that’s all, Pepé!
This week, Pepé Le Pew, the energetic French skunk from “Looney Tunes”, became the latest cultural accessory to receive the guillotine when he was kicked out of the movie “Space Jam: A New Legacy”, amid shouts that the cartoon character is a rapist.
Dave Chappelle first pointed out Pepé’s perverted manners in a 2000 comedy special called “Killin ‘Them Softly”. The comedian made a funny joke about him, we laughed and everyone moved on.
I admit that some of those grotesque Pepé episodes can make you cringe nowadays, as if they were part of a 2021 Albany documentary.
But before Warner Bros. turned the little boy into a dead animal on the road, couldn’t they first try to change the character’s image to the sequel led by LeBron James? Supposedly, in the cut scene he was going to learn something about consent. Pepé could have turned into a harmless flirtation, or a pretentious Frenchman instead of a tramp.
Not this time. Le Pew is l’histoire. And, as you can imagine with an animated show that started in 1930, almost everything and everyone on “Looney Tunes” is questionable by today’s Puritan standards.
See Lola Bunny. In the new film, the diffuse bomb was stolen from her hourglass figure and uses less fitted clothes to “desexualize her”. Call her Gertrude Hare. There were also demands from New York Times columnist Charles Blow for nix Speedy Gonzales, a beautiful Mexican rat.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias, who voices Speedy in “A New Legacy” and whose parents, unlike Blow’s, are Mexican, defended his beloved rodent on twitter.
“You can’t catch me canceling culture,” he said. “I am the fastest mouse in all of Mexico.”
So far, Warner Bros. kept Speedy in the film, but don’t get your hopes up. Public opinion no longer matters to Hollywood. The studios bow to leftist columnists and adjunct professors now in fear that they too could be canceled.
Hollywood will soon see that canceling old cartoons is a complicated wabbit hole.
Consider the cast of characters from the first “Space Jam” movie. There is Elmer Fudd, a hunter who carries a rifle while comically trying to kill Bugs Bunny. We can’t allow him to glorify armed violence now, can we? Speaking of the sneaky rabbit, in a 1944 World War II racist propaganda episode called “Nips the Nips”, Bugs says to a Japanese soldier: “Here it is, eyes pulled up!”
OK, so Bugs and Elmer were fired. Who comes out of it?
Daffy Duck is also not entirely clean. He attempted suicide horribly in the 1950s episode “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”. Playing a screenwriter who can’t sell his film to Warner Bros., the bird points a gun to his temple and says, “There was nothing for Scarlet Pumpernickel to do but blow his brains out,” and pulls the trigger. Fortunately, the bullet missed his head and went straight for the hat. Still, we’ll have to take the suicidal Daffy joke out as well.
Save us, gentle, innocent and impassive Porky Pig! Sorry guys. The adorable Porky is most famous for his stuttering, a condition that has been in the news lately. President Biden, who made the fact that he overcame almost all of his own speech problem a strange selling point for his campaign, will certainly go out and condemn poor Porky.
There are so few pure “Looney Tunes” left that the WB may have to cancel “A New Legacy” entirely. That’s all, folks!