Tweetie Pie

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For the animated character by the same name featured in this film, see Tweety.
Tweetie Pie
Blue Ribbon rerelease title card
Directed byI. Freleng
Story byTedd Pierce
Michael Maltese[1][2]
StarringMel Blanc
Bea Benaderet[3]
Music byCarl Stalling
Animation byGerry Chiniquy
Manuel Perez
Ken Champin
Virgil Ross
Layouts byHawley Pratt
Backgrounds byTerry Lind
Color processTechnicolor
Production
company
Distributed byWarner Bros. Pictures
Release dates
  • May 3, 1947 (1947-05-03) (original)
  • June 25, 1955 (1955-06-25) (Blue Ribbon re-release)
Running time
7:02
LanguageEnglish

Tweetie Pie is a 1947 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.[4] The short was released on May 3, 1947, and stars Tweety with Sylvester the Cat, who is called "Thomas" in this cartoon.[5]

Tweetie Pie marks the first pairing of the characters Sylvester and Tweety, and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1947,[6] breaking Tom and Jerry's streak of four consecutive wins in the category and winning Warner Bros. their first Academy Award.[7]

Plot[edit]

Thomas the Cat (later renamed Sylvester) captures Tweety, whom he finds outside in the snow, getting warm by a smoldering cigar stub. Thomas' unseen owner, Emma, sees him and saves Tweety from being eaten by Thomas, whom she promptly reprimands when he tries to eat him again. Tweety is brought inside, and Emma warns Thomas not to bother Tweety. Ignoring this command, Thomas initiates a series of failed attempts to get Tweety from his cage, many of which end in a noisy crash that brings Emma of the house downstairs to whack Thomas with a broom while calling him names, and then finally, throw him out altogether.

Undeterred, Thomas tries to get back into the house through the chimney. Tweety puts wood in the fireplace, pours gasoline on it and lights it. The phoom sends Thomas flying right back up the chimney and into a bucket of frozen water.

However, Thomas gets back in the house via a window in the basement (or study) and creates a Rube Goldberg-esque trap (virtually identical to one in Charles M Jones' 1945 Porky Pig short Trap Happy Porky) to capture Tweety. Of course, the trap narrowly backfires and injures Thomas instead.

Finally, Thomas tries to capture Tweety by running up to the attic and sawing a hole around Tweety's cage to remove it that way, but he instead ends up causing the entire inner ceiling to collapse (sans Tweety's cage, which is being held in place by a beam). The faux pas creates such a racket and mess that Thomas, fearing that Emma will punish him once more, takes her broom, breaks it in half, and tosses the pieces into the lit fireplace in a desperate frenzy. This proves to be meaningless, as he then immediately finds himself being walloped repeatedly with a shovel...by Tweety.

Production[edit]

In 1945, Bob Clampett, Tweety's original creator, began drafting the idea for a fourth cartoon that would've pinned the bird with Friz Freleng's Sylvester the Cat, who would also appear with Porky Pig in Clampett's cartoon Kitty Kornered (released in 1946). The cartoon, under the working title Fat Rat and the Stupid Cat, would've been the first cartoon to pair Sylvester and Tweety together, and the first to transform Tweety from a wild baby bird to a domestic canary.[8] However, Clampett left Warner Bros. before the cartoon entered production in any shape or form.

Friz Freleng meanwhile was working on-a follow-up to his second Sylvester cartoon, Peck Up Your Troubles, featuring Sylvester in pursuit of a witty woodpecker.[9][10] As production began around June 1945 (a month after Clampett's departure),[11] Freleng eventually wanted to replace the woodpecker with Tweety; however, producer Edward Selzer objected, and Freleng threatened to quit. Selzer allowed Tweety to be used, and the resulting film went on to win Warner Bros.' first Oscar, which Selzer accepted.[12] After Selzer's death in 1970, the Oscar was passed on to Freleng. The cartoon would also go on to become a phenomenal success, and as result, Tweety would always be paired with Sylvester from that point on in subsequent appearances, because the duo carried a high amount of star power.[13]

Sylvester, however, would appear in many shorts without Tweety, such as the Hippety Hopper series consisting of Hippety Hopper and Sylvester Jr. Those were directed by Robert McKimson. Sylvester also appeared alongside Speedy Gonzales and both Freleng and McKimson supervised cartoons pairing the two, and would win another Oscar for that pairing in 1955.

Home media[edit]

Although the cartoon was re-released into the Blue Ribbon program in 1955, the cartoon's original titles are known to exist.[14] When re-released, like most Merrie Melodies at the time, the original ending bullet titles were kept. On the following sets, the Blue Ribbon re-release print is available. The original titles were found in 2011 and it is unknown if Warner Bros. is aware of their existence, since the Platinum Collection set released in 2012 still had the Blue Ribbon titles.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Template:Bcdb title
  2. ^ Beck, Jerry (1991). I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety. New York: Henry Holt and Co. p. 90. ISBN 0-8050-1644-9.
  3. ^ Scott, Keith (2022). Cartoon Voices from the Golden Age, 1930-70. BearManor Media. pp. 68–69. ISBN 979-8-88771-010-5.
  4. ^ Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 174. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2.
  5. ^ Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 151–152. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  6. ^ Tweetie Pie, retrieved 2018-01-16
  7. ^ Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood Official Guide. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 2015. pp. 12–15.
  8. ^ "A116Animation". profilesinhistory.com. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  9. ^ Cryer, Max (2015). The Cat's Out of the Bag: Truth and Lies about Cats. p. 137. ISBN 9781775592075.
  10. ^ Beck, Jerry (1991). I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety. New York: Henry Holt and Co. p. 45. ISBN 0-8050-1644-9.
  11. ^ "Bob Clampett's "A Gruesome Twosome" (1945) |".
  12. ^ Friz on Film (Documentary). Warner Bros. 2006.
  13. ^ Sperling, Millner, and Warner (1998), pp. 187–188.
  14. ^ "Tweety's lost titles". Cartoon Brew. Aug 24, 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2019.

External links[edit]

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