Buddy
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- For President Clinton's dog see Buddy (dog).
- For the SCUBA diving partner system see Buddy system.
Buddy is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series of cartoons.
Buddy has his origins in the chaos that followed the severing of relations between animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising from producer Leon Schlesinger. Without his animators and the star character they had taken with them, Schlesinger was desperate to build his own cartoon studio and maintain his contract with Warner Bros. He lured in several animators from other studios, among them Earl Duvall from Disney. Schlesinger told his new employees to create a star character for the studio, and Duvall created Buddy in 1933.
Buddy was little more than his predecessor Bosko reincarnated as a cute little white boy. Buddy's films weren't much different from Bosko's, either. Music dominates in Buddy's world, and the characters merely exist to add a visual to the soundtrack and to participate in the odd gag. Buddy is usually accompanied in his films by his flapper girlfriend, Cookie, and his dog, Towser. The character would go on to star in 23 cartoons from 1933 to 1935 before he was retired to make way for newer, more interesting characters such as Porky Pig. Buddy's voice was performed by animator Jack Carr.
Buddy's shorts were all but forgotten until the era of television began in the 1950s. Program directors, searching for something cheap to fill time, rediscovered the "lost" cartoons from the 1930s. Despite the blandness of his films, Buddy has remained on television, somewhere in the world, almost constantly since then.
He was openly referenced as being bland in the Warner Brothers animated television series Animaniacs (which stars three cartoon characters dating back to the 1930s) in the episode "The Warner's 65th Anniversary Special" first broadcast on the 23rd May 1994. Buddy was cast as a villain rigging an awards show against his imagined enemies that stole his fame.
He is referred to in that episode as being a cartoon character with "big HUGE GINOURMOUS eyes". In that episode it states the reason the Warners were created to spice up a cartoon of his called Outback Buddy because it was the most boring cartoon they'd ever produced and was considered a cure for insomnia. There was aparently a series of Buddy-Warner cartoons, which just consisted of him in different jobs being hit by the Warners with their mallets. Eventually Thaddeus Plotz dropped Buddy and gave the Warners their own series of cartoons, and Buddy became a nut farmer in Awhide. Of course, this is only true in the Animaniacs tv series, and not in reality.
When not capitalized, the term "buddy" refers to a casual, non-committed social or sexual partner.