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Cartoon Evolution: From Orson to Tweety
There was a lot of drama that led to the creation of this cute little canary!
It's time for another round of Cartoon Evolution, where we work our way through the Looney Tunes characters and look at how they have evolved over the years. This edition is everyone's favorite yellow canary: Tweety! But he wasn't always yellow... and he wasn't always named Tweety either!
Tweety's journey starts as an unnamed baby bird in the 1942 Bob Clampett short Wacky Blackout. This black and white wartime toon features a farmer narrator telling the audience how all the animals on the farm are doing during the war, all of them having their own silly gags. The bird who would later become Tweety is a gruff little baby bird whose mother bird is trying to teach him how to fly. Unlike the canary Tweety would later become, these are wild birds who live in a tree. This version of Tweety is naked, with some feathers barely starting to grow and a very rough, almost vibrato kind of voice. His head is way larger than his body and you can see him struggling to hold it up as he stands. Even as he struggles to hold his head up, he insists "I wanna be a dive bomber!".
We see this model of the character again in A Tale of Two Kitties. Also directed by Bob Clampett, this short follows two Abbot and Costello-inspired cats who hungrily compete after a little bird called Orson. While never called by name, Orson is the name listed on the original character model sheets and he is a pink little baby bird who lives outside in a nest. This time around, he's a little softer, more of a sleepy baby bird than before. With a softened demeanor, Mel Blanc took a softer and higher pitched approach to his voice too. In this short we hear the beginnings of the iconic catchphrase "I tawt I taw a puddy tat". One of the biggest differences between Orson and Tweety is that Orson is quite violent: quick to grab a club, or a bat, or a gun, or anything and quickly dispatch it against the cats chasing after him. And just as quickly as he beats up on the bad ole puddy tats, he is just as quick to sweetly say "Aw, poor puddy tat."
The next times we see the little pink bird are in the 1944 short Bird and the Beast and the 1945 cartoon A Gruesome Twosome. This time around, his name was officially changed to Tweety. Previously, they tried not to repeat characters on Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, but they had seen success with Porky Pig and later Elmer Fudd so the animators at Termite Terrace were testing out other characters with recurring roles, including Tweety. In these shorts, very similar to the last one, two goofy cats are trying to chase down Tweety only to be bested by the baby bird. The only major character development for Tweety this time around was that he suddenly got these big, beautiful blue eyes. Even though he was now even cuter than he had ever been, Tweety was still a saucy, spicy little baby bird who loved messing with the big cats. So...when did the transition to Tweety we know and love begin?
It's honestly kind of sad! In 1945, Bob Clampett, creator of not only Tweety but also Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, left the studio. Producer Leon Schlesinger had sold his studio to Warner Bros. and retired in the process; Schlesinger had been very tolerant of Clampett's zany style and his style being unique to the other Looney Tunes animators, but his replacement, Edward Selzer, was not. Clampett (and to be fair, many of the other Looney Tunes directors) had faced a lot of censorship with his cartoons and Tweety was no exception. Censors didn't like that Tweety was naked, so Tweety cartoons were censored in Winnipeg and other smaller cities. Schlesinger had been understanding about the censorship issues the cartoonists faced but Selzer was more of a businessman and every censored cartoon was like setting money on fire. It is debated whether Clampett was fired by Selzer or left of his own accord, but over matters of artistic freedom and creative integrity, Clampett left with dozens of cartoons in different stages of production. One of those cartoons, which only had a storyboard, was called "Fat Rat and the Stupid Cat" and it was taken over by Friz Freleng.
This short featured Tweety and a then-unnamed black and white cat who would later become Sylvester. Freleng set about making several changes to Tweety and rewrote the short into Tweetie Pie, which would release in 1947. Freleng toned Tweety down, made him less violent and more innocent and cute. Freleng's Tweety wanted to befriend the cats, as opposed to Clampett's Tweety who would immediately spar and fight the cats. Now that Tweety had a more cutesy personality, he also needed a cutesy exterior: yellow feathers, to calm the censors, and long lashes to complement those big beautiful eyes. Likewise, Mel Blanc took the voice from soft and sleepy to energetic but still cute and sweet. Changing Tweety from a wild, outdoor bird to a canary did one major thing: it let Tweety stay small and cute forever. Many of the Orson-era Tweety cartoons started to feel robotic in their plot: bird sleeping in a nest outside is attacked by nearby cats. Now, Tweety was a pet, which meant he had a whole house to explore, or could accompany Granny to wherever she was going. Weirdly enough, putting Tweety in a cage led to him having more freedom of different kinds of stories he could be in, as opposed to the wild bird who just lived in a nest in a tree. Making Tweety a pet that lived inside also meant that he would be put in conflict with Sylvester more often. This model proved successful and led to over forty more Looney Tunes shorts starring Tweety.
Though drastic, Freleng's changes paid off and Tweetie Pie would win Warner Bros. their first Academy Award in 1947. Freleng would be the only director for Tweety from 1945 until the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio in 1963. While Tweety didn't go through as many appearance and personality changes as Elmer Fudd, we can appreciate how two Looney Tunes animators took a wild, scrappy little bird and whittled him down to the sweet, sassy cultural icon that Tweety is today.
