Thinking About Amorous Skunks

Ever heard of Tiny Toons? Tiny Toons. It was a cartoon, from the 90s. It was a youth-targeting reboot of the Looney Tunes media franchise, all those Merrie Melodies stories condensed down into a smaller, singular universe. While the original cartoons were targeted at adults, they had become something of a child’s product by the 90s, with this weird affect that jokes went over kids’ heads, and now they were mostly exaggeratedly silly, nonsensical slapstick comics. So, Warner Bros created this spinoff franchise and aimed more directly at kids.

I’m not going to say that Tiny Toons was amazing or anything but it sought to be reminiscent of the earlier generation of cartoons, using familiar characters, but reimagined. Now, one group of internet commentators, Cracked, put forward the idea of Bugs Bunny as some variety of genderqueer and pointed out that when the time came to reimagine Bugs for the 1990s, they needed two characters, one male, one female, to ‘properly’ represent Bugs. The same video then deliberately trips up on Elmira, the descent of Elmer Fudd, because hey, go out on a punchline but whatever.

Thing that’s been kicking around in my head on this is the relationship between another pair of characters in this scape; Fifi Le Fume and Pepe Le Pew.

Now, straight up, googling Fifi Le Fume gets you a host of fascinating pornography because, well, it would, because this is the internet and we have long since eroded the idea of respecting spaces that are important to children when it comes to porn, but what I find interesting is how when the time came to reimagine Pepe Le Pew, the character was changed to a girl. But more than that, Fifi was made to – broadly speaking – be attractive.

Thing is, Pepe Le Pew, straight up, was an asshole. It’s simplified somewhat when people joke about the discomfort in hindsight, but even if you remove the sexual element and suggest that his interest in the victim cat was just all g-rated smooches it’s still gross and invasive and cruel and bad. Like, the comedy was meant to derive from how funny it is that he didn’t realise she wasn’t interested. Like, the show’s intention was that he was an asshole, it just thought his kind of assholery was probably more acceptable than we would consider it today. And he isn’t emphasised as being particularly cute or attractive. Mostly, his face was coded to be expressive; he still had the tubby bean body of ‘cute but not adorable’ that the Looney Tunes favoured for a lot of character designs, the still-animal, but with human elements (unlike Bugs and Daffy, who were straight up meant to be human analogues with how their bodies were shaped). Ultimately, the comedy of Pepe was meant to derive from unwanted advances coupled with his complete indefatigability.

It’s pretty hard to find art of her that isn’t second-hand because the bulk of the internet is just… just a place of boners and strangeness, but, Fifi La Fume was rendered totally differently. First things first, even with the plasticity of face and body, she had rudimentary hips, a chest tuft and vague implications of a feminine chest, hair that fell over one eye, a style that at the time was kinda coded as being ‘sexy’ in cartoon characters. And it seemed to play out in her stories too, where she was represented as being a boy-crazy kinda girl, who was almost interesting, but her smell was an overwhelming dealbreaker. Add into this that Fifi could do stuff? Pepe was never coded as being capable of anything in particular, but Fifi was shown in numerous occasions as being both taller and stronger than many of the people around her.

It’s just an odd little happenstance. In the 90s we could tell that Pepe La Pew was a dickhead, and to try and bring his story forwards, we echoed those themes with a woman – but also in order to make that character funny rather than just tragic we had to add to her a lot.

A footnote: One of the stories about Fifi that really stuck with me is that she and Hamton, the kinda dumpy but goodnatured pig boy, appeared to get along pretty well. I hope that that’s the kind of story that can make some folk happy.