Tweety Bird turns 60

Earlier today, a colleague forwarded me an email entitled “Tweety Bird Turns 60 This Week”. I instantly got interested so I opened it immediately. It then got me more curious if Tweety Bird is indeed 60 years old. So I googled my way to check out the facts. And this is what I got from wikipedia.com:

Tweety (also known as Tweety Bird and Tweety Pie) is a fictional character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons. Tweety’s popularity, like that of The Tasmanian Devil, actually grew in the years following the dissolution of the Looney Tunes cartoons. The name “Tweety” is a play on words, as it originally meant “Sweetie”, along with “tweet” being a typical English onomatopoeia for the sounds of birds. Tweety has appeared in 48 cartoons.

Despite the widespread speculation that Tweety was female, he is and has always been a male character, something that he often has confirmed in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. On the other hand, his species is ambiguous; although originally and often portrayed as a young canary, he is also frequently called a rare and valuable “Tweetybird” as a plot device, and once called “The only living specimen”. Moreover, the title song suggests that it is a Canary. His shape more closely suggests that of a baby bird, which in fact is what he was during his early appearances. The yellow feathers were added but otherwise he retained the baby-bird shape.

Tweety is, for the most part, a good-natured character happily spending life in his cage or a nest. However, when a cat or other adversary threatens him, he can become downright malicious and devious, even kicking his enemy when he’s down. In many of Tweety’s appearances the bird is shown accompanying his owner, Granny.

Obviously, wikipedia’s post did not give me the info that I needed. So I again googled, clicked on the next item and  found another info from cartoonspot.net:  

Bob Clampett created the character that would become Tweety in the 1942 short A Tale of Two Kitties, sitting him against two hungry cats named Babbit and Catstello (based on the famous comedians Abbott and Costello). On the original model sheet, Tweety was named Orson (which was also the name of a bird character from an earlier Clampett cartoon Wacky Blackouts.

And so, the email was wrong! If Tweety Bird is really celebrating his birthday this week, he should be 67 years old. Imagine that, Tweety must really be an old haggard by now.

Well, here’s the lovable Tweety Bird as we know him…

 

And here is how he looks like now…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kawawa naman, parang candidate na sya for Andok’s… hehehe!