Woody Woodpecker Day

The animated character is the subject of this article. See Woody Woodpecker (disambiguation) for other usage.

Since 1940, Universal Pictures has distributed theatrical short films using the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker, which was created by Walter Lantz Studio and Universal Animation Studio. Walter Lantz produced Woody's final Woody Woodpecker in 1972.

Lantz and storyboard artist Ben "Bugs" Hardaway, who had already set the foundation for two other screwball characters, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, at the Warner Bros. animation studio in the late 1930s, created Woody, an anthropomorphic woodpecker, in 1940. Over the years, Woody's persona and appearance changed, going from a crazy bird with an exceptionally gaudy design to a more sophisticated-looking and acting figure reminiscent of the later Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny.[5] Mel Blanc, a well-known voice actor, was the first to portray Woody. In the shorts, he was followed by Danny Webb, Kent Rogers, Dick Nelson, Ben Hardaway, and, at the end, Walter Lantz's wife Grace Stafford.

In 1957, Woody Woodpecker cartoons were first shown on television under the name The Woody Woodpecker Show. Lantz cartoons were intercut with fresh Woody and Lantz live-action footage. Lantz created theatrical cartoons for a longer period of time than most of his peers, and Woody Woodpecker was a mainstay of Universal's release schedule until Lantz eventually shut down his studio in 1972.

Since then, the character has been brought back for one-off shows, special events, and The New Woody Woodpecker Show, a Saturday-morning cartoon television series that ran from 1999 to 2002 and included popular voice actor Billy West as Woody.[7][8] Woody Woodpecker, a live-action/computer-generated imagery hybrid feature film, was released direct-to-video in other regions but in theaters in Latin America in 2017. A new series of shorts that were made available on YouTube starting in 2018 came after it. Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp is a brand-new movie that debuted on Netflix in 2024.

At 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, Woody has a movie star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the 1988 motion picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he also made a cameo appearance among numerous other well-known cartoon characters. The official mascot of Universal Pictures is Woody Woodpecker. In addition, Woody and his pals are enduring symbols at the PortAventura Park in Salou, Spain, and the Universal Studios theme parks across the globe, even though Universal no longer has a financial interest in the park.

starting point

The notion that producer Walter Lantz and his wife Grace were inspired to create the character during their 1940 June Lake, California honeymoon is a little shaky considering Woody's debut appearance was before Lantz and Stafford's trip.[9] The couple was awakened in the middle of the night by the loud acorn woodpecker outside their cottage. When the rain started coming down, they discovered that the bird had made holes in their roof.

Walter planned to shoot the bird, Gracie told Dallas lawyer Rod Phelps during a visit, but Gracie suggested her husband draw a cartoon about it instead, and that's how Woody was born.But, as Lantz's biographer Joe Adamson notes, Ben Hardaway and L.E. Elliott had penned a tale in which Andy Panda and his father, Papa Panda, had roof problems brought on by a downpour. After glancing at the storyboard, Lantz declared it to be "too expensive". He recommended using a woodpecker as his easier-to-animate roofing problem because woodpeckers had shown incidentally in a few of Lantz's cartoons from the 1930s, such as the 1936 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Night Life of the Bugs.

Woody and the pileated woodpecker are similar in many ways, including appearance and the way he laughs, which is similar to the sound of the pileated woodpecker. Because of the artists' creative liberty, these similarities have led to a great deal of uncertainty among birdwatchers who have tried to categorize Woody's species.