Well?
Someone once paid me to answer the question of Tweety’s gender:
Is Tweety-Bird a boy or a girl?
Smizmar.
I was going to link to wikipedia, but I think pinkfreud wins with the cites. :eek:
I tink he’s a widdle boy bood!
He may be Twee but he is all he.
In some cartoons Tweety wears a sailor cap, which was a popular thing little boys wore at the time those cartoons were made. He’s a boy. The issue got confused when he became a popular adornment for girl’s clothes. Just like Blue, from Blue’s Clues is female, but you see her on boys clothes, and Pink from Blue’s Clues is male.
Kif, baby? Is that you?
[/Amy]
As was the case for most cartoons from that general era, Tweety was probably not originally conceptualized as a male bird or a female bird, but simply a bird. (No, that wasn’t the case for most cartoons etc etc, you know damn well what I meant).
Cartoonists would make one short, make another, make another, and somewhere, eventually, would find it useful to dub in gender, usually in exactly the situation described for Tweety — the possibility of being entranced by a cute female of their sort, and almost always as a decoy or a trick. The cartoonists themselves were male, and it generally did not occur to them in such situations to have the decoy / sexual trickery thingie take the form of a dashingly handsome fella catching the eye of the previously-ungendered cartoon character who suddenly becomes a she. Partly just because they would draw on their own experienced and partly because in that pre-feminist era folks just unconsciously thought of “the generic experience” as being male if sexuality is to enter the picture. As if being female were rare or alternative somehow.
Thus, there aren’t that many characters in cartoons that are indeed female. There’s the girl-kitty that Pepe Le Pew chases around, and the widow hen that Foghorn Leghorn wishes to settle down with, and Tweety’s Granny of course. Granny is a human (humans always have gender), the kitty is female because the entire joke-premise of Pepe Le Pew is an affectionate smelly skunk mistaking a female kitty cat for a female skunk. The femaleness of the widow hen is plot-driven (the travails of Foghorn Leghorn trying to woo). None of the animated animals are main characters who just happen to be female. Pretty much true for non-WB characters, too.
The only time you see female animals in cartoons, outside of old granny chickens and ducks, is when they are a love interest.
Tweety is no love interest.
As far as I know there are no female main character females in Warner Bros cartoons. Or any other mainline cartoons.
I could be wrong. Flying on memory here.
There were hens in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and were rarely love interests.
Disney has a few. In addition to Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck (who maybe don’t count because they’re love interests, you have Clarabelle Cow, and in the Banks Duckburg, a whole bunch of them…Grandma Duck, April, May, and June, Ma Beagle, etc.
Was the first cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur?
Witch Hazel. And in '93 we were introduced to Minerva Mink.