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| Star Face.That Is Awesome. |
Skunks don’t live in France and don’t mate with cats, but anything is possible in a cartoon. Beginning with the 1951 cartoon Scent-imental Romeo, Warner Bros. used the formula of having a lovesick French skunk, Pepe Le Pew, pursue a “female skunk”—actually a cat who had a stripe of white paint spilled on her back.
Mouthing romantic phrases in both bad English and bad French, Pepe hopped gaily after the disgusted cat. Part of the fun in these cartoons is that real skunks are not graceful but real cats are, and the Pepe cartoons reverse this, with the frantic cat tripping over herself to flee the skunk.
