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Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Of Skunks, Horny and French

I arrived at my computer and found the following image on my computer’s desktop background with this, all stretched out and pixelated.



Apparently, someone was demonstrating how Wikipedia works and ended up on the Wikipedia page for Fifi Le Fume, the Tiny Toons character. That page led to the page for Miss Mam’selle Hepzibah, a character from Walt Kelly’s Pogo. She apparently is also a horny female skunk. This strikes me as odd. Why should there be more than one amorous French skunk in the universe of animated characters? Logically, one could assume that one ripped off the other, though Wikipedia is unhelpful in determining whether Hepzibah or Pepe Le Pew — Fifi’s Looney Toons analogue — came about first. Rather, I think the trend of making skunks French and horny merely comes from the fact that Americans like to regard the French as gonad-driven and drenched in body odor. Which, I assume, sucks for the French.

The tipper here is that Hepzibah struck another obscure pop culture note with me. The very last graph of her Wikipedia entry explains that in the X-Men universe, there’s actually a character also named Hepzibah. Initially a skunk-girl, the series directors eventually changed her into a cat-girl. Either version of this Hepzibah is a member of Corsair’s Starjammers, and I actually remember her from the cartoons.


Strange, that. But I like that some guy drawing X-Men characters would be familiar enough with Pogo to name a character after that series’ sole female.

2 comments:

  1. Excuse me posting on such an old blog entry, but I just wanted to add this little tidbit:

    In the comic it's stated that Corsair named Hepzibah after the Pogo character, reason being that her true name is a series of scents and therefore impossible to pronounce ;)

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  2. Sir or ma'am, I take my hat off to you. Thanks for shedding more light on this strange pop culture footnote.

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