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Tweety Bird (also known as Tweety Pie or simply Tweety) is an Academy Award-winning fictional character 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. Today Tweety is considered, along with Taz and Bugs Bunny, among the most popular of the Looney Tunes characters, especially (because of his "cute" appearance and personality) among girls and young women. Despite widespread speculation that he was female, Tweety is and has always been a male character, something that he often has confirmed in The 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 "Tweetybird" as a plot device, and once called 'The only living specimen'.
Tweety is, for the most part, a good-natured character happily spending life in his cage or a nest. However, when a cat or other adversary threatens him, he can become downright malicious and devious, even kicking his enemy when he's down. In many of Tweety's appearances the bird is shown accompanying his owner, Granny.
Bob Clampett created the character that would become Tweety Bird 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 Blackouts).
Tweety was originally naked (pink), jowly, and 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 three more shorts with the "naked genius", as a Jimmy Durante-ish cat once called him in Gruesome Twosome. The last of these, 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" is changed to a "t" or "d" sound; for example, "pussy cat" comes out as "putty tat", or sometimes rendered "puddy tat", and "sweetie pie" comes out as "tweetie pie". He also has trouble with the "r" and "l" sounds. As with Elmer Fudd, it tends to come out as a "w". He also has troubles with gutturals, such as "g". 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..." (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 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. Wikipedia |
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