Touché and Go

Pepé Le Pew devolved in a few short years from an Oscar winner to a cliché. Or perhaps that should be “Le Cliché.” By the late ‘50s, his cartoons are indistinguishable from each other. A cat accidentally gets a white stripe of paint down its back. The cat runs away, stopping to catch her breath with the words “Les Pant.” Pepé talks and talks and talks. And hearts find their way into the design. In every single cartoon. Sometimes they’re trails of smoke, sometimes they’re bubbles, other times they’re in Maurice Noble’s backgrounds. Jones loved gags coming out of the artwork. Here’s an example in “Touché and Go” (1957).



Not knowing my French geography, I’m not sure where this is supposed to take place (do they have cliffs near the French-Italian border?) but here are more of Noble’s backgrounds.






Do they have volcanic islands in the Mediterreanean?

Noble has a number of underwater backgrounds as well, as Jones quickly cuts from one to the next while Pepé is in a scuba mask.

Phil De Guard did his usual fine job constructing these.