Elmer Fudd

The character Elmer J. Fudd, now one of the most famous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters, also has one of the more convoluted and disputed origins in the Warner Brothers cartoon pantheon (second only to Bugs Bunny himself). His aim is to shoot Bugs Bunny but always ends up seriously injuring himself.

His stock line is: "Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I'm hunting wabbits, ehehehehehehe." He does not say this in every single cartoon in which he does appear; for example, Daffy Duck appeared with him in "Quack Shot," but Bugs wasn't there.

Egghead
In 1937, Tex Avery introduced a new character in his cartoon short Egghead Rides Again. Egghead had a bulbous nose, funny/eccentric clothing, a voice like Joe Penner, and an egg-shaped head. Many cartoon historians believe that Egghead evolved into Elmer over a period of a couple of years.

Egghead made his second appearance in 1937's Little Red Walking Hood and then in 1938 teamed with Warner Brothers' newest cartoon star Daffy Duck in Daffy Duck and Egghead. Egghead continued to appear in a string of cartoons in 1938: The Isle of Pingo Pongo, Cinderella Meets Fella, and A-Lad-In Bagdad. However, it wasn't until A Feud There Was (1938) where his character was identified as "Elmer Fudd, Peacemaker", though he still maintained his Egghead-ish appearance.

Egghead (or the prototypical Elmer Fudd) made four more appearances in Johnny Smith and Poker-Huntas (1938), Hamateur Night (1939), A Day At The Zoo (1939), and forty-nine years later in the 1988 compilation film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters.

In the 1939 cartoon Dangerous Dan McFoo, a new voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan was hired to provide the voice of the hero dog-character and it was in this cartoon that the popular "milk-sop" voice of Elmer Fudd was created.

Elmer emerges
In 1940, Egghead/Elmer's appearance was refined giving him a chin and a less bulbous nose (although still wearing Egghead's style of clothing) and Arthur Q. Bryan's "Dan McFoo" voice in what most people consider Elmer Fudd's first true appearance: a Chuck Jones short entitled Elmer's Candid Camera. A prototypical Bugs Bunny drives Elmer insane. Later that year, in Tex Avery's A Wild Hare, Bugs reappears, but this time with carrot, Brooklyn/Bronx accent, and "What's Up, Doc" all in place for the first time. Elmer has a better voice and a trimmer figure, too. Elmer's role in these two films, that of would-be hunter, dupe and foil for Bugs, would remain his main role forever after, and although Bugs Bunny was called upon to outwit many more worthy opponents, Elmer somehow remained Bugs' classic nemesis, despite (or because of) his legendary gullibility, small size, short temper, and shorter attention span. Somehow knowing not only that Elmer would lose, but knowing how he would lose, made the confrontation, counterintuitively, more delicious.

Elmer was usually cast as a hapless big-game hunter, armed with a double-barreled shotgun and creeping through the woods "hunting wabbits." In a few cartoons, though, he assumed a completely different persona — a wealthy industrialist type, occupying a luxurious penthouse — or, in one hilarious episode involving a role reversal, a sanitarium! — which Bugs would of course somehow find his way into. He appears in the video game Bugs Bunny Lost in Time as the boss of the era Stone Age and in Bugs Bunny and Taz Time Busters as the boss in the Vikings era.

Fat Elmer
For a short time in the early 1940s, Elmer's appearance was modified again. He became a heavy-set, beer-belly character, patterned after Arthur Q. Bryan's real-life appearance, and still chasing Bugs (or vice versa). Audiences didn't accept a fat Fudd, so ultimately the slimmer version (which was only fat in the head, literally and figuratively) returned for good.

The voice of Elmer Fudd
Fudd was originally voiced by the radio actor Arthur Q. Bryan, but after Bryan's death in 1959, was reluctantly assumed as yet another voice by the versatile Mel Blanc (although other voice actors have alternated as Fudd's voice). Bryan's characterization remains the definitive one. He was never credited onscreen, because only Blanc had the clause in his contract that required a screen credit. Elmer has also been voiced by Daws Butler, Greg Burson, Jeff Bergman, Billy West and others over the years.

The best known Elmer Fudd cartoons include Chuck Jones' masterpiece What's Opera, Doc?, (one of the few times Fudd succeeded in getting Bugs, and he feels bad about it), the Rossini parody Rabbit of Seville, and the "Hunter Trilogy" of "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" shorts (Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!) with Fudd himself, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck.

He nearly always misplaced r and l with w when he would talk in his slightly raspy voice (a trait that also characterizes Tweety Bird). That characterization seemed to fit his somewhat timid and childlike persona. Naturally, the writers often gave him lines filled with those letters, such as doing Shakespeare's Romeo as "Soft, what wight thwough yonduh window bweaks!" or Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as "Kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit...!"

Elmer's easily mimicked voice lends itself to endless takeoffs. In recent times, Robin Williams has parodied Elmer doing Bruce Springsteen: "I'm dwivin' in my cah... I turn on on the wadio..." or as Marlon Brando's character in A Streetcar Named Desire saying "Stewwa!"

Occasionally Elmer would properly pronounce an r or l sound, depending on whether or not it was vital for the audience to understand what the word was. (For example, in 1944's The Old Gray Hare, he clearly pronounces the r in the word "picture")

Trivia

 * Google allows you to change the active language to Elmer Fudd in the options.
 * When United States Vice President Dick Cheney, himself rotund and bald, accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington while hunting quail, countless parodies arose on the Internet drawing parallels between Vice President Cheney and Elmer Fudd.
 * In Confederate Honey (1940), there is an Elmer-esque character named Ned Papler.