Foxy
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See also Foxy (disambiguation)
Foxy is an animated cartoon character featured in the Merrie Melodies series of films distributed by Warner Bros. The character is a black fox with teardrop-shaped ears and a bushy tail. Otherwise, he looks exactly like the Walt Disney character Mickey Mouse during that character's black-and-white period.
Animator Rudolf Ising created Foxy as the star of the new Merrie Melodies series he was directing for producer Leon Schlesinger (Ising had already helped his partner Hugh Harman create another series, entitled Looney Tunes). Foxy's first appearance on screen was in "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!" (first released in August, 1931), a standard musical comedy of the era, here set in a Western saloon (this was also the first Merrie Melodies short). The character and his 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.
Foxy was the most unabashedly unoriginal of the various Mickey Mouse duplicates so prevalent in the 1930s, a fact that didn't escape the notice of Walt Disney. Ising retired the character after only three cartoons, possibly at Disney's request. Foxy's departure didn't spark much originality, however, as Ising simply replaced him with another Mickey stand-in named Piggy.
Nevertheless, Foxy was not gone forever. He appeared along with his girlfriend (here christened "Roxy") and fellow forgotten Warner Bros. progenitor Goopy Geer in "Two-Tone Town", an episode of the animated series 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. The series animators significantly redesigned the foxes for this episode, making them more like the stars of the later series Animaniacs than their Mickey and Minnie incarnations from the 1930s.
External link
- Another profile of the character (http://bosko.toonzone.net/characters/foxy/)