Ba-dee, a dee, that’s all, Pepe!
This week, Pepé Le Pew, the handsome French skunk of “Looney Tunes,” became the last cultural pairing the guillotine got when it came out in the upcoming movie “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” of screams that the cartoon character is a rapist.
Dave Chappelle first pointed out Pepé’s perverse ways in a 2000 special comedy called “Killin’ Them Softly ”. The comic made a funny joke about him, we laughed and everyone continued.
I grant you, some of these old and grumpy episodes of Pepé can make you go bankrupt today as if they were part of a documentary about Albany in 2021.
But before Warner Bros. turn the little boy into a roadkill, couldn’t they have tried to change the character’s image for the sequel directed by LeBron James? According to reports, at the court scene he was going to learn something about consent. Pepe could have turned into a harmless flirt or a pretentious Frenchman instead of milk.
Not this time. Le Pew is the history. And, as you can imagine with an animated program that began in 1930, almost everyone and everything in “Looney Tunes” is unacceptable by today’s puritanical standards.
Take Lola Bunny. In the new film, the fuzzy bomb has stolen her hourglass figure and she is wearing less suitable clothes to “desexualize” her. Call her Gertrude Hare. There have also been demands from New York Times columnist Charles Blow to nix Speedy Gonzales, a beautiful Mexican mouse.
The comic Gabriel Iglesias, who expresses Speedy in “A New Legacy” and whose parents, unlike Blow, are from Mexico, he defended his beloved rodent on Twitter.
“I can’t get caught to cancel the culture,” he said. “I’m the fastest mouse in all of Mexico.”
So far, Warner Bros. has kept Speedy in the film, but we don’t wait. Public opinions no longer matter in Hollywood. Studies are leaning on left-wing columnists and adjunct professors now, for fear that they, too, may be canceled.
Hollywood will soon see that the cancellation of old cartoons is a tricky wabbit hole.
Think of the cast of characters from the first “Space Jam” movie. There’s Elmer Fudd, a hunter who wraps around a rifle while trying to comically kill Bugs Bunny. Now we can’t make it glorify armed violence, right? Speaking of the cunning rabbit, in a short episode of 1944 World War II racist propaganda called “Nips the Nips,” Bugs says to a Japanese soldier, “Here you have your eyes tilted!”
Okay, so Bugs and Elmer are fired. Who leaves that?
Daffy Duck is not a cleaner either. He tried to commit suicide terribly in the 1950 episode “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”. Playing a screenwriter who can’t sell his film to Warner Bros., the bird puts a gun to the temple, says, “Scarlet Pumpernickel had nothing to do but blow his brain,” and grabs the trigger. Fortunately, the bullet misses his head and passes directly through his hat. However, we will also have to start Daffy, who makes a suicidal joke.
Save us, Pig Friendly, innocent and borderless pig! I’m sorry, guys. Adorable Porky is most famous for his stuttering, a condition that has been in the news lately. President Biden, who made overcoming his own speech impediment a strange selling point of his campaign, will surely come out and condemn poor Porky.
There are so few pure “Looney Tunes” left, maybe WB should cancel “A New Legacy”. Tha-tha-that’s all people!