Whatever Happened to Woody Woodpecker?

Regarding classic cartoon characters, I feel there are multiple categories regarding their status and relevancy within culture. There are characters like the classic Disney and Warner Bros ones or Tom and Jerry who have remained relevant and ever-present since their debut and have ingrained themselves into global pop culture. There are those like Popeye, Betty Boop, or Casper who, while not as relevant as they used to be in terms of mainstream relevance, are still remembered by a lot of people and have a noticeable impact visible even today. And then, there are the ones that either only cartoon fans and historians really remember, or people who grew up with them. Ones whose names still ring a bell, but are more or less a thing of the past. Characters like Mighty Mouse, Rocky and Bullwinkle, or the Pink Panther are remembered, but feel faded out of public consciousness compared to many of their contemporaries. There is one character who occupies this category who has fascinated me for years on end simply because of how steep a drop in his relevance feels. He was once the face of animation for a whole studio and now feels kept around mostly out of obligation. I am referring to Woody Woodpecker. Once a mascot of Universal has now been relegated to something that feels odd to look at compared to characters like Mickey or Bugs.

Woody began his life like many other cartoon characters in the golden age of animation in the early 1900s as a character developed by one of the many animation studios that produced short films for the major studios at the time. His studio was Walter Lantz Productions, which was founded and led by the aforementioned animator. The most notable thing about the studio before Woody’s birth was that they were the ones who were given the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The same Oswald that was taken from Walt Disney due to disputes, which led to the creation of Mickey. I’m sure a lot of people are unaware of this, but Oswald had a lengthy life after the departure of his creator throughout the 30s. By the 40s, though, there was a push by Lantz to find a new star to focus on. The first effort was a character named Andy Panda, who was inspired by a trip Lantz took to the zoo, where he saw baby pandas. While Andy would stick around, he didn’t really develop into a strong character, comedy-wise, or gain a lot of popularity and disappeared in the 50s.

The creation of Andy, however, would inadvertently lead to the creation of Woody. In 1940, the same year Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry also debuted, the first short featuring Woody, titled Knock Knock, debuted. It was an Andy Panda cartoon where he and his dad try to get rid of an obnoxious Woodpecker pecking holes in their roof. Even from the start, the character left an impression. His wild look, his pestering demeanor, and his already iconic laugh made the character hard to ignore. Part of the influence came from story man Ben Hardaway, who had developed a rabbit character with a similar wacky demeanor and laugh at Warners that would eventually evolve into Bugs. The traits there fit this character much better, and the studio found its new star.

Throughout the 40s, Woody would evolve drastically. He was initially voiced by legendary voice actor Mel Blanc before he signed an exclusivity deal with Warner Bros. and later sued for the shorts still using the laugh he recorded. The more garish elements of his design, such as his goofy teeth and crazy eyes, were sanded off. One of the directors at the studio, Shamus Culhane, pushed the character further with more expressive animation and even experimented with fast-cutting editing and avant-garde art usage. He directed arguably the most iconic short featuring the character, The Barber of Seville, which has Woody take the role of a barber and harass clients. The shorts featuring the character combined fluid and expressive animation with simple stories about Woody basically being a public menace. Even compared to characters like Daffy or Donald, Woody’s demeanor was so aggressive and violent. He was less of a wily trickster or world-weary cynic and more like a genuine lunatic. These tendencies would also be sanded down over time, with Woody becoming more of a generic good guy trying to get out of situations.

Woody ended up becoming a huge hit with Fanclubs and became recognizable within the general public. He even got a theme song titled The Woody Woodpecker Song, which got an Oscar nomination (the only time it ever happened with a short film), and it became the music that opened his shorts going forward. By the end of the 40s, though, contract disputes resulted in Lantz parting ways with Universal to move to another studio, United Artists. The move ended up backfiring as UA had heavy financial issues. This resulted in Lantz having to temporarily shut the studio down for a full year so he could use the revenue from existing short distribution to cover accumulated debts.

After the closure, Woody changed some more. His first reappearance was a cameo in the film Destination Moon, directed by animator George Pal. This marked the change of Woody’s voice to the longest-tenured one. While many, such as Bugs Hardaway and brief Warner mainstay Kent Rogers, briefly voiced the character after Mel, no voice really stuck. It wasn’t until Grace Stafford, Lantz’s own wife, snuck an audition tape anonymously and got the part. The character was redesigned further to look cuter, and almost all of his aggressive tendencies were gone by this point. The shorts he starred in took more limited approaches in animation due to the rebuilding of the studio and also the overall decline in demand and budgets for short animation. There was even a brief time when Woody was made into a silent character in order to appeal to the foreign markets.

By this point, the evolution and life of Woody had basically hit their plateau. He would remain relevant both in theaters and on TV with The Woody Woodpecker Show that Lantz himself hosted. Walter Lantz Productions would mostly stay the course for the next two decades until closing up shop in 1972. By that point, Lantz had determined that he had kept the studio open for as long as he could. It ended up being the longest-lasting of the classic animation studios and one of the last to provide theatrical shorts. Only being outlasted by DePatie-Freleng, the studio formed by the last producer of Warner shorts and Friz Freleng, the most seasoned director at the studio, which had only been around for less than a decade and transitioned to TV animation not long after.

After the 70s and the end of the TV show, Woody slowly started to drift away from popularity. He would cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and was referenced in other media, but for whatever reason, the well of new Woody media dried up. The only notable effort was in the 90s, where Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong of Ren and Stimpy fame developed The New Woody Woodpecker Show. Unfortunately, the ingenuity and effort of the creators were removed from the show, with Universal wanting something safe and marketable, resulting in a cartoon that didn’t leave too much of an impression. By the 2000s, outside of a few DVD releases of the classic shorts and appearances at the Universal theme parks, Woody was basically nonexistent. The rise of Universal’s own new animation studio, Illumination, as well as their purchase of DreamWorks and the multitude of characters they had, put Woody out of a job as the animated face of Universal. By this point, it felt like being the animated mascot of the studio was a job he was in mostly out of obligation until this point. The only projects that have been made since have been two animation/live action hybrid films and a flash animated web series, which are all of very low quality. Compared to the constant attention or new projects that other characters get, it’s kind of wild how Woody is basically gone from both as a recognizable character and being in new projects in general, for the most part.

As for why the character faded out of relevance and was barely used for decades, well, I can hardly tell you. Maybe it was that Universal never became a great home for animation. They didn’t develop their own studio until long after the others and have only gotten the ball rolling on consistent animation output with Illumination and the acquisition of DreamWorks. There weren’t many franchises that they had under their umbrella, and the few that they did, such as The Land Before Time, were mostly milked in the direct-to-video market. The theme parks mostly featured licensed animated stuff, and Universal never really showcased its old cartoons to the same extent that other studios have for decades. There is also the fact that Woody’s filmography is very scattershot. While his 40s and a good chunk of his 50s output is solid, it does lack the comedic or character strengths that allowed the works of other studios to stand the test of time. Woody was very simple as a character, and his shorts really didn’t evolve beyond the basic ideas or push the boundaries in comedy or animation as the Warner or MGM shorts did. It didn’t help that any strengths he had in his best shorts were scaled back as time went on, and a large chunk of his cartoons are mostly standard and limited, with little personality and animation that resembles the very limited and cheap stuff made for TV.

There’s also the fact that the overall output of Walter Lantz’s studio suffered from the same issues. Warners, Fleischer, and MGM get consistent historical and cultural attention both from fanatics and in reverence in pop culture, but Lantz’s output, while solid, didn’t really leave much of an impression. It was above most of the lower-tier stuff of the time, but never really coalesced into something beyond the basic cartoon tropes, which makes it hard to stand out in the crowd. Characters like the Looney Tunes benefit from having a wide array of personalities and styles to elevate each other as a group, and they are multifaceted from the perspective of Warner Bros both as consistent mascots and historical icons. Woody mostly stands alone as the one prominent creation of the studio. The smaller output of shorts from Lantz and the mixed quality resulted in them not really being able to stand out above the pack compared to other libraries. Other studios simply had more shorts that were consistently more interesting and entertaining and had a much larger spotlight put on them by the companies who owned them and the public compared to Woody and the other shorts he was surrounded by, especially with how Universal has mostly just ignored their old cartoons in general.

Even after all of this, though, there is one factoid that is the most amusing of all: Woody is huge in Brazil. This is mostly due to being the character constantly shown on broadcast TV for decades and having a local dub that was free to appeal to Brazilian humor. That, and the character’s personality resonated with the broader culture of the country and was broadly embraced both in mainstream areas and online. Even the bad live-action hybrid was mostly developed with the country in mind and had a huge theatrical rollout there. As a result, despite his near disappearance from the rest of the world, Woody is still beloved in a huge country.

At the end of the day, Woody’s story is one of the strangest of the classic cartoon characters. From being the face of one of the longest-lasting animation studios of the period, to now being an afterthought in general and mostly forgotten about. I honestly see more conversation about him being forgotten than about the stuff he’s been in. Even so, I still have a fondness for the character. Not just because of all the odd eccentricities that befell him, but also because of his really good shorts. There’s just something so compelling about the cartoon maniac being so undiluted and violent even by the standards of the day. The history of certain media can go in directions no one can ever expect, and this is a case that is just too compelling to forget once you learn of it, despite how forgotten the character seems to have been.