Foxy

Foxy is an animated cartoon character featured in three 1931 animated shorts in the Merrie Melodies series distributed by Warner Bros. He was the creation of animator Rudolf Ising, who had worked for Walt Disney in the 1920s.
== About Foxy ==
Foxy is a short, black-furred fox with a white face, a black nose, a black bushy tail, and two tear-dropped shaped ears. He wears a white pair of shorts and black shoes with white spats, along with white gloves.
Foxy is one of any number of early cartoon characters modeled after the successes of Paul Terry's and Otto Messmer's work in the 1910s and 1920s, namely Felix The Cat (1919). Foxy himself is a close cousin to Disney's characters Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927) and Mickey Mouse (1928).
In 1925, Hugh Harman drew images of mice on a portrait of Walt Disney. Disney and Ub Iwerks would then use it as an inspiration for their creation of Mickey Mouse, the character who eventually became Disney's most popular.Kenworthy, John "The Hand Behind the Mouse," Disney Editions: New York, 2001. p.54 Knowing that Disney and Iwerks had cashed on their little idea, Harman and Ising figured it was only fair that they should conceive a character of a similar mold, thus leading to the creation of Foxy.
Foxy was the star of the first Merrie Melodies cartoons Ising directed for producer Leon Schlesinger. (Ising had already helped his partner Hugh Harman create another series, titled Looney Tunes with the character Bosko.) Foxy's first appearance on screen was in August 1931 in "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" The cartoon, which shares a set-up with Disney's more swashbucking "The Gallopin' Gaucho", (1928). Like the second Mickey vehicle, "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" opens with the mounted hero arriving at a Western saloon and falling for the bar singer. Where Mickey ends up chasing and fighting Black Pete, Foxy is instead upstaged by his horse, which gets drunk, introducing a sequence of wild hallucinations.
Foxy and his then-nameless girlfriend would appear in two more cartoons that same year directed by Ising: "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!" (September 5, 1931), a musical set on a trolley and usually considered one of the better Ising Merrie Melodies, and "One More Time" (October 3, 1931), a musical cops-'n'-robbers short. Ising retired the character after those three cartoon shorts due to a threat of a lawsuit by Walt Disney, because Foxy was heavily designed off of Mickey Mouse. Another similar character, named Piggy, replaced him in the October, 1931 short "You Don't Know What You're Doin'!"
Nevertheless, Foxy was not gone forever. He appeared along with his girlfriend (here named Roxy) and fellow forgotten Warner Bros. progenitor Goopy Geer in "Two-Tone Town", an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures first released on September 28, 1992. The three live in a world of black-and-white which is visited by the series' stars, Babs Bunny and Buster Bunny. In this episode, he, along with Roxy, was given a drastic redesign that, apart from making them look less like Mickey and Minnie Mouse, made them actually look like foxes; the outlines around his eyes are gone, his shoes no longer have spats, his ears are now more triangular, his snout is pointier, he has a white tip on his tail common to real-life foxes and his head sports pointy tufted cheeks. This version of Foxy was voiced by Rob Paulsen and Roxy was voiced by Desiree Goyette.
His name was shown on a tombstone in the Looney Tunes Cartoons episode "Graveyard Goofs".
== Appearances ==
* "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" (1931)
* "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!" (1931)
* "One More Time" (1931)
== Later ==
* "Two-Tone Town'
* "Graveyard Goofs'
== Gallery ==
Screenshot 20210803-185059 YouTube.jpg
Tumblr lp0v4eGOEN1qm6sfao1 500.gif
Lady, Play Your Mandolin!.jpg
Foxy1.jpg|Appearance in the Steven Spielberg extended universe
Twotonetown.jpg|From left to right, Buster, Goopy Geer, Roxy, Babs, & Foxy in "Two-Tone Town" (1992)
== References ==
== External links ==
* Foxy and Roxy profile at Toonzone.net
es:Foxy
ru:Фокси
Category:Characters
Category:Looney Tunes Characters
Category:Animals
Category:1931 Introductions
Category:Males
Category:Characters voiced by Rob Paulsen
Category:Foxes
Category:Tiny Toons Characters