Tweety

Tweety (short for Tweety Bird or Tweety Pie) is an animated fictional yellow canary in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated 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. His characteristics are based on Red Skelton's famous "Mean Widdle Kid." Tweety appeared in 47 cartoons in the golden age.

Personality and identity

Despite the perceptions that people may hold, owing to the long lashes and high pitched voice (which Mel Blanc provided), Tweety is male, although his ambiguity was played with. For example, in an episode called "Snow Business", when Granny entered a room containing Tweety and Sylvester and said: "Here I am, boys!", whereas a 1951 cartoon was entitled Ain't She Tweet [emphasis added]. Also, his species is ambiguous; although originally and often portrayed as a young canary, he is also frequently called a rare and valuable "tweety bird" as a plot device, and once called "the only living specimen". Nevertheless, the title song of The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries directly states that the bird is a canary. His shape more closely suggests that of a baby bird, which is what he was during his early appearances (although the "baby bird" aspect has been used in a few later cartoons as a plot device). The yellow feathers were added but otherwise he retained the baby-bird shape.