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Notes on Speedy Gonzales & Slowpoke Rodriguez, his half-baked cartoon cousin

July 27th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Last night a Mexican friend came over to watch some cartoons and, being the patronizing gringo that I am, the evening began with a handful of Speedy Gonzales shorts.

Of all the superstars in the Warner Bros. cartoon canon, Speedy Gonzales is probably the most nonessential. Within thirty-six hours of purchasing each of the five Looney Tunes Golden Collections, I had watched every cartoon and most of the supplementary features, including the audio commentaries. Until last night, the Speedy Gonzales disc remained the only virgin in the set.

With the possible exception of Being There, a feature length comedy cannot, nor should not be a one note proposition. (See Arthur. The title character is a drunk. Get it?) Live actors squandering five reels in search of variations to play on a one trick premise seldom works, yet with a little ink and paper and only seven minutes to fill, one joke can work miracles. Everywhere that the Wolf went Droopy was sure to go. No matter how hard he tries, Wile E. Coyote will never dine on Road Runner. Every move Daffy makes leads to a buckshot facial from Elmer’s rifle. In each instance, the comic resourcefulness and precision character response jumps out from the screen.

A grinning Speedy Gonzales yells, “Andale! Andale! Epa, Epa! Arriba! Arriba!” as he zips past El Pussygato, arms burdened with cheese for his impoverished amigos who react to his beneficence by jumping up and down.

Suddenly Little Audrey looks good.

Speedy wasn’t always a cuddlesome, Mexican hat-dancing mouse. In Robert McKimson’s Cat-Tails for Two, the pesos needed in order for Speedy to secure what would eventually become his trademark sombrero were spent on an unappealing gold front tooth. According to Robert McKimson, Jr., the fastest mouse in Mexico (and friend of everybody’s sister) was based on a pair of Mexican brothers his father played polo with. The grimy rodent, pitted opposite a much more appealing pair of John Steinbeck retreads, discharged little audience appeal short of Mel Blanc’s well-seasoned vocalization that he had spent years perfecting on The Jack Benny Program.

The studio had faith in the character so Friz Freleng and his designer Hawley Pratt set about retooling the rodent. Their final solution was a featherless cross between Tweety Pie and the Road Runner. As a Coyote substitute to play opposite Gonzales, Freleng recruited the services of his venerable foil, and Tweety’s arch nemesis, Sylvester the Cat aka Sylvero Gato. Speedy would frequently sneak up behind Sylvester and substitute a couple of “Arriba! Andale’s!” for “Meep Meep’s’” that sent the cat soaring to the stratosphere. Cannibalizing his own creation, Freleng modified Tweety’s “I like him, he’s silly” catchphrase to fit the mouse.

The redesigned rodent made his debut in the aptly titled Speedy Gonzales. Long before John McCain was a blip on the Republican radar, Sylvester was a staunch proponent of keeping our borders closed, particularly those that skirt the American cheese factory he’s hired to patrol. The most memorable moment in the cartoon comes when one of its characters actually dies! The first mouse to cross the border takes up permanent residence in Sylvester’s belly.

Enter Senor Speedy, fresh from the dentist and decked out in surgeon’s white pajamas and an oversize sombrero that combine to render him hopelessly adorable. The supposedly beloved folk hero and friend to all makes his living on the opposite end of a shooting gallery dodging bullets. When presented with the choice of having one cat to outwit or hundreds of bullets to outrun, Speedy makes a mad dash for the border.

The cartoon was so popular that it won the 1956 Academy Award for best short subject and a Looney Tune legend was born.

El Tyson’s Ratón Enchillada Televisión Cena

With his amphetamine drive and penchant for junk food, it’s no wonder Speedy was drawn to compadres with addictive personalities. In Tabasco Road, Speedy rescues (and feeds) a couple of bottomless borrachos on their way home from a tequila bar, but none of Speedy’s pals could match his psychologically dependent cousin Slowpoke Rodriguez.

Slowpoke, “the slowest mouse in all Mexico,” is the polar opposite of primo Speedy. Perhaps the reason for his lethargy can be traced back to the hand-tooled lyrics of his favorite Mexican melodia, La Cucuracha. Literally translated, the lyrics read: “The roach, the roach, can’t walk any more, because it needs, because it needs, marijuana to smoke.” It’s weed-head Slowpoke’s terminal case of the munchies that sends Speedy on  numerous deadly cheese runs.

Alas, the ratty role model was only used in one cartoon. It had nothing to do with Slowpoke being a muy malo role model. On the 2003 Behind the Tunes documentary Needy for Speedy, Warner Bros. animator Art Leonardi said when Speedy would run, “it’d take very few drawings to do it. We had a character called Slowpoke Rodriguez and he’d sing a song that took a long time to animate. We very seldom used the character because by the time he walked into the scene we used up a minute-and-a-half of footage.”

Recent developments in political correctness find our fast and furious friend cut off at the ankles. In 2001, Ted Turner denied reports that he banned the racially insensitive Speedy shorts. A network spokesmen claimed that Speedy’s absence came about because the cartoon’s ratings had dropped. Not wanting to offend Mexican Americans, Cartoon Network has also banished Speedy from its airwaves. Speedy doesn’t seem to bother the League of United Latin American Citizens, “the nation’s oldest Hispanic-American rights organization,” who labeled the cartoon legend “a ‘cultural icon’ who displayed plenty of admirable pluck.”

Joe Dante’s sadly undervalued Looney Tunes: Back In Action contains Speedy’s last big screen performance. While lunching with Speedy in the Warner’s commissary, Porky Pig, the most enduring star in the studio’s cartoon cosmos, ponders the current cultural climate. “At first, they told me to lose the stutter,” he laments with head in hands. “Now they tell me I’m not funny. It’s a pain in the butt being politically correct.” In an era when self-appointed bluenoses had the power to halt production at so much as a hint of promiscuity, the boys at Termite Terrace continually outfoxed the censors by smuggling cell after cell’s worth of “objectionable” material into their cartoons.

There would be no Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies were it not for political incorrectness. In the thirties and forties, the studio fought hard to keep certain gags in their cartoons in spite of what their detractors had to say. In that spirit, Porky has earned the right to tell all of his critics to go fu, go-fu, go fu, go fu, go away!

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Comments

3 Responses to “Notes on Speedy Gonzales & Slowpoke Rodriguez, his half-baked cartoon cousin”

  1. Rob on July 27th, 2008 10:22 pm

    I never found the Speedy Gonzales cartoons funny at all. Not because I find the stereotypes racist due to my Mexican-American heritage.

    The main reason I never liked Speedy is because if you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen them all - watch Speedy go supersonic to outwit Sylvester.

    It was painful to watch as a kid long before I learned about the stereotypes involved. I usually channel surfed when I heard “Arriba! Andale”.

    But I would always come back to see what Wile E. Coyote ordered out of the Acme catalog in his never ending (and much funnier) battles with the Road Runner.

    Looking at the Speedy cartoons now, I find some lines & situations amusing and tolerable but not over the top hilarious aka Road Runner.

    Non-essential indeed, patronizing gringo!

  2. Scott Marks on July 27th, 2008 10:54 pm

    Si!

  3. Rob on July 28th, 2008 8:12 am

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9s8U0O0XPE

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