On November 25, 1940, Woody Woodpecker made his first appearance in an Andy Panda cartoon called “Knock Knock.” As a recent CBS Sunday Morning segment explained, Walter Lantz created the animated bird from inspiration from a woodpecker knocking on his roof.
I loved Woody Woodpecker when I was a kid. When we watched 8mm home movies, my dad had two non-family reels for the projector with one of the Three Stooges and one of Woody Woodpecker. Like home movies back then, they were silent, so we enjoyed the short films without Woody’s famous laugh, which was created by Mel Blanc and later voiced by Lantz’s wife Grace Stafford. I also had a toy where you looked in a viewfinder toward a light source and cranked a little roll of film so you could see part of an episode of a Woody Woodpecker short.
You do not see Woody Woodpecker around so much today, perhaps because Lantz stopped making new cartoons in 1972 or perhaps the abrasive Woody does not teach life lessons as do modern children’s characters. Still, I like to think that Woody did not make me obnoxious, and he gave me a lot of fun.
There have been reports of Woody Woodpecker movies in the works (albeit with a “modernized” version of the character). Update: In 2013, Illumination Entertainment signed animator Bill Kopp to work on a film about Woody Woodpecker, although as of 2016 the status of that possible Woody Woodpecker movie is unclear.
Another Woody Woodpecker movie will be released in October 2017 in Brazil., apparently because many classic cartoons are now more popular in other countries besides the U.S. That film may see some type of DVD release in the U.S.
For now, we will have to be satisfied with the real classic cartoons we can find on the Internet. Check out one below as you celebrate Woody’s birthday.
What is your favorite memory of Woody Woodpecker? Leave your two cents in the comments.
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