Pepé Le Pew voice for the character closely resembles the one he used for "Professor Le Blanc", the harried violin instructor on "The Jack Benny Program". Pepé Le Pew's cartoons were dubbed in French; in the French version ("Pépé le putois"), Pepé speaks with a heavy Italian accent. His voice is a parody of Yves Montand. Chuck Jones first introduced the character (originally named Stinky) in the 1945 short "Odor-able Kitty" (see "Variations"), in which he was revealed to be a married American skunk named Henry who had been faking his French accent. For the remaining cartoons Jones directed, Pepé retained his accent,
What a Cartoon! Dog", "Mike, Lu & Og", "Sheep in the Big City", "Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?", "", "Grim & Evil" and "Megas XLR" as well as Fox's "Family Guy". The series is influential for birthing a slew of original Cartoon Network hits and helping to revive television animation in the 1990s. Once it had several original shorts, those became the first Cartoon Cartoons (a collective term for retro Cartoon Network original series). From 2005 to 2008, "The Cartoon Cartoon Show" was revived as a block for reruns of older Cartoon Cartoons that had been phased out by the network. Fred Seibert