Pepé Le Pew is an animated character from the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons, introduced in 1945. Depicted as a French striped skunk, Pepé is constantly on the quest for love. However, his offensive skunk odor and his aggressive pursuit of romance typically cause other characters to run away from him. Premise Pepé Le Pew storylines typically involve Pepé in pursuit of a female black cat, whom Pepé mistakes for a skunk ("la belle femme skunk fatale"). The cat, who was retroactively named Penelope Pussycat, often has a white stripe painted down her back, usually by accident (such as by squeezing under a fence with wet white paint). Penelope frantically races to get away from him because of his putrid odor, his overly aggressive manner or both, while Pepé hops after her at a leisurely pace. Settings The setting is always a mise-en-scène echoing with fractured French. They include Paris in the springtime, the Matterhorn, or the little village of N'est-ce Pas in the French Alps. The exotic locales, such as Algiers, are drawn from the story of the 1937 film Pépé le Moko. Settings associated in popular culture with romance, such as the Champs-Élysées or the Eiffel Tower, are sometimes present. One episode was in the Sahara Desert, with Pepe seeking to work as a Legionnaire at a French military outpost. Narcissism Pepé describes Penelope as lucky to be the object of his affections and uses a romantic paradigm to explain his failures to seduce her. For example, he describes a hammer blow to his head as a form of flirtation rather than rejection. Accordingly, he shows no sign of narcissistic injury or loss of confidence, no matter how many times he is rebuffed. Reversals In a role-reversal, the Academy Award-winning 1949 short For Scent-imental Reasons ended with an accidentally painted blue (and now terrified) Pepé being pursued by a madly smitten Penelope (who has been dunked in dirty water, leaving her with a ratty appearance and a developing head cold, completely clogging up her nose). It turns out that Pepé's new color is just right for her (plus the fact that the blue paint now covers his putrid scent). Penelope locks him up inside a perfume shop, hiding the key down her chest, and proceeds to chase the now-imprisoned and effectively odorless Pepé. In another short, Little Beau Pepé, Pepé, attempting to find