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I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat!

Chuck Jones "It's startling, to say the least," director and animator Chuck Jones told the Virtual Stamp Club. "I'm sure that none of us had any idea that such a thing would ever occur."

Two of the Tweety & Sylvester shorts Jones directed won Academy Awards.

How did the famous tag line come about? One of the writers went to a park in Buffalo NY, on his vacation some 60 years ago. "And he suddenly heard this little girl behind him [say] 'Mommy, I tawt I taw a twirrel [squirrel]! I did! I did see a twirrel!'" Jones says when the writer returned to Hollywood, "they talked it over and decided it might be better if [Tweety] said 'I tawt I taw a puddy tat.'" That was 60 years ago.

Sylvester was animator Fritz Freleng's creation. "If you notice the voice, he has the same lisp that Daffy Duck does," Jones told the Virtual Stamp Club . "You speed up the film on Daffy so that he talks fast.

"We didn't dwell particularly, though, on peculiar characteristics. What we wanted was personality. It's the personality of these characters that exists today." Jones says it's that that allows the characters to outlast newer creations, who are mostly verbal. The Looney Tunes characters communicate as much through their movements.

Jones related to the Virtual Stamp Club the time a deaf woman spoke to him at a recent public appearance. "She said, 'I never heard the dialogue (in the cartoons), but I could always tell what Bugs or Daffy were doing by the way they moved.' And that's what acting is about, that's what we tried to do."

Jones has never collected stamps, and doesn't plan to start now. "I've worked with these characters for so long."

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