Red Hot Riding Hood

The inclusion of Red Hot Riding Hood in Tex Avery's animated short film, along with her earlier appearance in Little Rural Riding Hood, has truly impressed me with this bold and alluring cartoon character. One of Avery's finest creations and a significant breakthrough in animation, it is celebrated as his legendary masterpiece in the world of animation.

The story begins with a standard Little Red Riding Hood story, but the characters rebel against the standard staging and demand a fresh approach. Now set in a contemporary urban setting, Red is a sexy adult nightclub entertainer, while Wolf is a debonair skirt chaser in love with Red. Red escapes Wolf, but his oversexed grandmother locks him in her apartment, chasing after him at every door.

Unlike my beloved cartoon character, Betty Boop, who embodied a charmingly innocent demeanor, Red personified pure sensuality, primarily serving the purpose of arousing the wolf (symbolizing males in general) into an intense state of desire. Red briefly introduced herself as a seductive distraction for the Wolf character, who had already appeared in the WWII cartoon "Blitz Wolf" and was obsessed with getting some action. She drove the sex-crazed wolf to do all the things that were to become trademarks of Avery's cartoons: the eye-popping, the jaw-dropping, and the gravity-deifying pratfalls. She gained such widespread popularity that she appeared in three more animated series. Her cartoons were originally entertaining to American soldiers during wartime but remained off television for a long time due to their explicit nature.