Character: penelope pussycat
A relatively minor Looney Tunes character, Penelope Pussycat is a female feline, the black cat who keeps getting a white stripe painted down her back, making her the target of Pepé le Pew's misplaced affections. She frequently appears to be receptive to his charms early in the cartoon, until she notices le Pew's repugnant stench, at which point she flees from him, and is relentlessly pursued.
She did not have an official name, as she was given alternate names like Penelope, Fifi and Fabrette. Chuck Jones’ model sheet from 1960 simply referred her as "Le Cat". The name "Penelope Pussycat" was later created retroactively for Warner Bros. marketing, and was made canon in the 1995 Looney Tunes short and parody of the movie Casablanca, "Carrotblanca".
As the unfortunate target of unwanted physical attention, Penelope has been examined in feminist film criticism as an example of a "rape-revenge narrative"; however, such reading is complicated by the ending of some of the cartoons, which flip the dynamic and leave Pepé as the unwilling recipient of the cat's affections.
Like with almost every anthropomorphic character in fiction, she is a mainstay in a lot of furry art, and these would pair her with Pepé doing...
Let’s leave the rest to anyone who is reading it...
See also:
- Pepé le Pew
- Looney Tunes
- Furrball
- Penelope’s partial successor from Tiny Toon Adventures
This tag implicates looney_tunes (learn more).