Webcreations by Jumpy: Tweety

Tweety

Birthday: November 21, 1942

Looney Tunes Warner Bros.

Burbank, California

Tweety is a cartoon character, a yellow canary bird in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons. Bob Clampett created the character that would become Tweety in the 1942. He appeared in 46 cartoons during the golden age, made between 1942 and 1964.

The Golden Age

The golden age of American animation was a period that began with the popularization of sound synchronized cartoons in 1928 starting with Steamboat Willie, and gradually ended throughout the 1960s when theatrical animated cartoon film shorts lost ground to the newer medium of television.

Multiple highly popular animated cartoon characters emerged from this period, including Snow White, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Popeye, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Pepé Le Pew, Woody Woodpecker, and Tweety & Sylvester.

Personality and Identity

Despite the perceptions that people may hold, owing to the long eyelashes and high-pitched voice, Tweety is male.

In his early appearances, Tweety is a very aggressive character who tries anything to foil his feline adversary, even kicking the cat when he is down.

Tweety's aggressive nature would later be toned-down to have him be portrayed as a cutesy bird usually going about his business, and doing little to thwart Sylvester's ill-conceived plots, allowing them to simply collapse on their own. He became even less aggressive when Granny was introduced, but occasionally Tweety still showed a malicious side when egged on.

Tweety & Sylvester

The first short film to team Tweety and the cat, later named Sylvester, was 1947's Tweetie Pie, which won Warner Bros. its first Academy Award for Best Short Subject.

Sylvester and Tweety proved to be one of the most notable pairings in animation history. Most of their cartoons followed a standard formula:

Sylvester wants to catch and eat Tweety, but some major obstacle stands in his way – usually Granny or her bulldog Hector (or occasionally, numerous bulldogs, or another cat who also wants to catch and eat Tweety).

Sylvester spends the entire film using progressively more elaborate schemes or devices to catch Tweety.