Tag: dr. horrible

Podcast Topic: Top 5 Cartoon Characters

So coming up on the 2nd of February, I’ll be hosting the Geek Fallout Podcast. The Topic for this podcast is Top 5 Cartoon Characters! I just finished putting together my list of favorite toons and also gathered history/information on each toon. 🙂 Now like all pre-podcast posts, I’ll only give you a few of the items on the list.  You’ll have to just listen to the podcast to hear the last two…

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So coming up on the 2nd of February, I’ll be hosting the Geek Fallout Podcast. The Topic for this podcast is Top 5 Cartoon Characters! I just finished putting together my list of favorite toons and also gathered history/information on each toon. 🙂 Now like all pre-podcast posts, I’ll only give you a few of the items on the list.  You’ll have to just listen to the podcast to hear the last two !mmmmmwwwwahahahahahaha!

At first I wanted to do just Looney Tunes & Hanna-Barbera only for this podcast. But after thinking about it and a talk with some of my fellow podcasters. I opened it up to every cartoon out there, plus there will less of a chance of us copying each other. So here we go!! This is the list I have put together, enjoy!

05: Marvin the Martian: After Bugs Bunny had begun to outwit Yosemite Sam.. Friz Freleng & director Chuck Jones decided to create the opposite type of character, one who was soft-spoken, but whose actions were incredibly destructive & legitimately dangerous. Marvin the Martian was the result! Marvin made his debut with 1948’s Haredevil Hare. Unlike the other Warner Bros. cartoon villains, Marvin can be actually evil at most points, and not just daft  like the others, he is also funny.

The design for Marvin was based on a conception of the Roman God Mars. “That was the uniform that Mars wore that helmet and skirt. We thought putting it on this ant-like creature might be funny. But since he had no mouth, we had to convey that he was speaking totally through his movements. It demanded a kind of expressive body mechanics.”
Marvin was never named in the original shorts – he was called the Commander of Flying Saucer X-2 in The Hasty Hare in 1952. But only decades later, when the character attracted merchandising, the current name was selected.

04: Foghorn Leghorn:  Foghorn Leghorn was directly inspired by the popular character of Senator Claghorn. ASouthern politician played by Kenny Delmar who was a regular character on the Fred Allen radio show. The rooster adopted many of Claghorn’s catch phrases, such as “That’s a joke, ah say, that’s a joke, son.” Delmar had based the character of Claghorn upon a Texas rancher who was fond of saying this.
A leghorn is a breed of chicken, and foghorn describes the character’s loud, overbearing voice.

According to Leonard Maltin the character’s voice was also patterned after a hard-of-hearing West Coast-only radio character from the 1930s, known simply as The Sheriff, on a radio program called Blue Monday Jamboree. The voice has similarities to that of another Mel Blanc voice: Yosemite Sam (a strictly Friz Freleng character).

03: Wile E. Coyote: Chuck Jones based Wile E. Coyote on a Mark Twain book called Roughing It. Which Twain described the coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton” & “a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Chuck Jones said he created the Coyote-Road Runner cartoons as a parody of traditional “cat and mouse” cartoons like MGM’s Tom and Jerry, which Jones would work on as a director later in his career. Jones modeled the Coyote’s appearance on fellow animator Ken Harris.

The Coyote’s name of Wile E. is a play on the word “wily.” The “E” was said to stand for Ethelbert in one issue of a Looney Tunes comic book. The Coyote’s surname is routinely pronounced with a long “e”, but in one cartoon short, To Hare Is Human, Wile E. is heard pronouncing it with a diphthong ky-OH-tay. Early model sheets for the character prior to his initial appearance (in Fast and Furry-ous) identified him as “Don Coyote”, a play on Don Quixote.

Well I hope you enjoy this little list of cartoon characters as much as I did. I can’t wait till this podcast and hear everyone’s picks for the Top 5. Make you come by and give us a listen at Geek Fallout!