For Scent-imental Reasons

I'll be totally honest. I was never a big fan of Pepe Le Pew. Every one of his cartoons is the same. For some silly reason a cat will end up a white stripe on it's back and Pepe, a smelly skunk, falls in love with her. His foul scent is so strong that when he grabs her and unleashes an endless barrage of kisses, she can only become like butter in his arms with a dazed look on her face. Occasionally she will try to escape and Pepe will fob it off with something like 'You are play-eeng hard-to-geet'. Blah, blah, blah, they are all the same.

Grant, this one was the first and it won an Oscar. But that was probably the reason they made so many more. This one does have a funny twist at the end when Pepe's love falls into a barrel of water and emerges like crack-addicted rat and the tables are turned. But it's still not really THAT funny. Pepe was only ever a supporting character and never strong enough to carry a whole cartoon.

He IS very cute though.

This cartoon won an Oscar for Pepe Le Pew almost ten years before Bugs Bunny won for Knighty Knight Bugs. Pepe is one of my favorite characters and this is one of the better cartoons in the series, although not my personal favorite (that's Touche and Go). Pepe discovers wht it's like to have the shoe on the other foot in this one. Great fun in this one. It should be in-print. It has been in the past, most notably on the tape A Salute to Chuck Jones from the Golden Jubilee series. Cartoon Network shows it fairly often. Recommended.

Paris, France: A perfume shop owner discovers that the amorous skunk Pepe Le Pew is generously sampling his perfumes. The distraught shop-owner flings a cat inside to eject the skunk. The feline femme fatale, of course, has her back dyed white, and when Pepe sees this, he of course tries to woo her (sometimes forcibly), blissfully unaware that she is trying to escape his scent-imental attentions.

"For Scent-imental Reasons" was the first Pepe cartoon I ever saw, having seen it on tape in "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie". The ending and beginning are a bit funnier and more unique than usual, and some of the humor comes from sources besides Pepe, which is unusual. Certainly one of his best efforts, although not the best of all.

Like just about every Pepe Le Pew cartoon, there's a female cat who's mistaken for a skunk because of white paint that conveniently forms a straight line on the cat's back. As a result, Pepe falls madly in love with her while she is repelled and tries to escape with her running frantically and he just hopping along without a care in the world. That's the premise of the nearly whole series in a nutshell but this one has a twist at the end that makes For Scent-imental Reasons somewhat worthy of the Oscar it eventually won. In fact, I was pretty amused throughout most of the cartoon. And I always wonder how much of the French was real and how much of it was gibberish! Ah well, Say la vie!

This was the cartoon that formed Pepe Le Pew as we know and love him. It was this cartoon that Chuck Jones found the correct formula to make Pepe a true winner.

Earlier, producer Eddie Seltzer thought that no one would believe that a French-speaking skunk was funny. Jones and Seltzer really battled on that. But when this cartoon won an Academy Award in 1949, he was proven wrong, and stepped up to receive the award anyway!

According to Chuck, Pepe, like Bugs Bunny, is one of his aspirations. He held a place in Chuck Jones' heart. He claimed that he never had much luck with 'les femmes' when in school, and Pepe is a character with so much security in his own sexuality that he contained much will power. So Pepe's a very personal character to Mr. Jones.

In the past, the humorous 'talking-through-the-glass' scene was cut due to the suicide reference. However-Pepe: I meesed...fortunately for you!"

His name was a spoof of Charles Boyer's character in the French film Algiers, a character named Pepe Le Moko.

A truly great for the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes collection.

BTW: I am saddened by the fact that Mr. Charles M. Jones, the last of the original Looney Tunes directors and creator of such a great Looney Tune, passed away just recently.

*sniff* Goodbye, Chuck Jones... >_<