Warner Brothers is trying to push their legacy animation characters back into American pop-culture. New York Magazine is reporting that Warner Bros. is developing a life-action/CGI movie based on the love struck Pepe Le Pew which will be voiced by Shrek creator Mike Myers.
The decision to reinvigorate the Looney Tunes cast of characters – which includes fading American icons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig – is a high priority for Warner Bros., for while they still throw off a billion dollars in licensing revenue annually, that’s barely a fifth of what Disney makes every year from licensing better-known characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Created in 1945, Pep’e Le Pew starred in over a dozen animated short films for Warner Bros., and one of them, Chuck Jones’s For Scent-imental Reasons, even won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject (Cartoons) in 1949.
H/T: animatedviews.com
Great. So when Myers breaks into his one-note Scottish schtick, as he is bound to do….ugh. I can’t even go on.
Even the immortal Chuck Jones couldn’t put the old spark back into post-1960s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies revivals and clip shows (although the night club segment of “Quackbusters” comes close. Every entertainment company in the world has a huge case of mouse envy – should that mean that they turn themselves into clones of King Rat?
The best entertainers know when to fade into the background – ask Bill Watterson.
“… which will be voiced by Shrek creator Mike Myers.”
I’m pretty sure Mike Meyers did not create Shrek.
Children’s book author/illustrator William Steig created Shrek.
All the great WB characters have long since been turned from engaging personalities into advertising shills. This sounds to me like a train wreck that will have an enormous budget, a big promotional push, and will go nowhere.
I like the idea of bring WB characters back into play but a full length Pepe movie seems like a hard one to make interesting. It was okay as a short running gag cartoon, but a full movie. Can’t see it.
Did Mike Myers get his face ripped off by a leopard or something? He was reasonably funny when he did live action but all he does is voice now. And it’s the same voice… over and over.
This looks like another “Cat In The Hat” train wreck waiting to happen.
I will never understand why Hollywood insists on making one-note gags, cartoons, or SNL skits into movies. Pepe Le Pew had a few good cartoons, and was a fun character…but a full length movie? And haven’t social attitudes changed just a tad since those first came out? You watch those now and you’re thinking “this skunk is at best sexually harrassing the hell out of that cat who got a stripe on its back in a strange ‘deus ex machina’ way at the beginning of the cartoon.”
And this would be a 90 minute film?
By the way, I DO, of course, know why Hollywood makes SNL skit movies…they’re cheap and by the time you factor in foreign box office and DVDs, they probably make some decent pocket change for the studios. But animation ain’t cheap…there are apparently still idiots out there who think “we can make a profit on a 100 million dollar movie about Pepe Le Pew! Yeah!”
Mike Myers as the world’s most notorious cat rapist?
Sounds about right 😛
Well said, Tom. At least they’re not making a feature out of the shorts where Sylvester the cat thinks a kangaroo is a giant mouse.
Or have I spoken too soon?
Why don’t they just re-release the best of the shorts? I would sit through 3, nay, 4 hours of that.
I don’t think you can modernize PePe. That and there was only one Mel Blanc.
On another post of Alan’s I said studio’s were dream killers, that I never thought they could pull off a good casting of well known characters. These are the same idiots that, if given the chance, would have Steve Carell voice Calvin and Johnny Depp voice Hobbes. This Pepe Lepew story confirms my fears.
BTW, whatever happened to using professional voice artists like Billy West?