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Ba-dee, un dee, that’s all, Pepé!
This week, Pepé Le Pew, the beautiful French skunk of “Looney Tunes”, became the latest cultural staple to get the guillotine when he was kicked out of the upcoming “Space Jam: A New Legacy” movie, amid cries that the cartoon character is a rapist.
Dave Chappelle first pointed out Pepé’s kinky ways in a 2000 comedy special called “Killin ‘Them Softly.” The comedian made a funny joke about him, we laughed and everyone moved on.
Granted, some of those old gropey episodes of Pepé can make you cringe these days like they’re part of a documentary about 2021 Albany.
But before Warner Bros. turned the little guy into a roadkill, couldn’t they first have tried changing the character image for the LeBron James-led sequel? Apparently in the movie scene he was going to learn something about consent. Pepé could have turned into a harmless flirt, or a pretentious Frenchman instead of a lech.
Not this time. The Pew is the story. And, as you can imagine with an animated show that started in 1930, just about everyone and everything in “Looney Tunes” is objectionable by today’s Puritan standards.
Take Lola Bunny. In the new movie, the fuzzy bomb was stolen from her hourglass figure and wears less tight-fitting clothes to “deexualize” her. Call her Gertrude Hare. New York Times columnist Charles Blow also asked Nix Speedy Gonzales, a cute Mexican mouse.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias, who voices Speedy in “A New Legacy” and whose parents, unlike Blow, are from Mexico, defended his beloved rodent on Twitter.
“You can’t catch me canceling the culture,” he said. “I’m the fastest mouse in all of Mexico.”
So far, Warner Bros. has kept Speedy in the movie, but don’t hope. Public opinions no longer matter to Hollywood. Studios bow to leftist columnists and assistant professors now for fear that they, too, will be canceled.
Hollywood will soon see that canceling old cartoons is a twicky wabbit hole.
Consider the cast of characters in the first “Space Jam” movie. There’s Elmer Fudd, a hunter who hangs around a gun as he comically attempts to assassinate Bugs Bunny. We can’t let him glorify gun violence, can we? Speaking of the sneaky bunny, in a 1944 racist WWII propaganda short titled “Nips the Nips,” Bugs said to a Japanese soldier, “There you go, slanted eyes!”
OK, so Bugs and Elmer are fired. Who does that leave?
Daffy Duck isn’t spotlessly clean either. He horribly attempted suicide in the 1950 episode “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”. As a screenwriter who can’t sell his movie to Warner Bros., the bird puts a gun to his temple, says, “There was nothing for the Scarlet Pumpernickel to do but blow himself up.” brains ”, and pulls the trigger. Fortunately, the bullet misses his head and goes straight through his hat. Still, we’ll also have to give the boot to Daffy, who jokes about suicide.
Save us, nice, innocent and borderless Porky Pig! Sorry guys. Adorable Porky is best known for his stuttering, a condition that has been in the headlines a lot lately. President Biden, who has made the fact that he mostly overcomes his own speech barrier a strange selling point of his campaign, will surely speak out and condemn poor Porky.
So few pure “Looney Tunes” remain that WB may have to cancel “A New Legacy” altogether. Tha-tha-that’s all people!
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