YMMV / Pepé Le Pew

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Let's be real: would a 21st-century viewer be familiar with the (rather outdated) stereotype that French people are smelly and horny (besides looking it up online)?
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • In this day and age, Pepé is hated by Moral Guardians and some fans of Looney Tunes in general due to Values Dissonance. Those who don't hate Pepé see him as an Ensemble Dark Horse because the values dissonance of his cartoons presumably represent how free and audacious Golden Age cartoons were. Others point out later reimaginings of him manage to keep his nature recognizable while avoiding the Values Dissonance issue (such as Wabbit: A Looney Tunes Production making him a James Bond parody), and thus getting rid of him altogether is a poor choice.
  • A lesser charge laid against Pepé by some fans of Looney Tunes is that his shorts are formulaic. Pepé's defenders point out that a) the outcome of each Pepé short is unique, and b) he is hardly the only "formulaic" member of the Looney Tunes. Most Looney Tunes could be accused of being formulaic to some degree, and that's without counting exceptions like Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird or Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
• Bizarro Episode: "Odor Of The Day" is completely detached from the standard formula, with Pepé (a mostly Heroic Mime here) instead in a feud with a dog over shelter in the snow. The animation and visuals are also far different from Chuck Jones' usual style, due to being created by Arthur Davis' unit. He also lacks his French accent for the one line he gets.
• Broken Base: Disregarding the obvious, there are still arguments to this day if all the cats in his shorts are supposed to be Penelope under a case of Depending on the Artist or if the ones not consistent with her 'modern' design are completely separate cats/characters in their own right.
• Death of the Author: In his autobiography, Chuck Jones said that a major rule of Pepé was that he couldn't even find out that he smelled bad because it'd crush him. This despite the fact that his very first "official" appearance, as well as one other short, has him find this out with little to no angst (save the fake suicide attempt).
  • This idea was enforced in "Really Scent", which was directed by Jones understudy Abe Levitow. Pepé was indeed crushed when he realized his odor, but worked to correct the issue in that particular cartoon.
• Depending on the Artist: Not in the shorts themselves, but in other items (comics, art, ads, video games), there is a variable with Penelope: does she have a natural stripe or not?
• Draco in Leather Pants: Depending on if you view Pepé as a "villain" at least. Generally, most of his fans either portray him as a lonely woobie who just wants love because most living beings are terrified of skunks or a clueless nitwit who doesn't realize he's committing sexual harassment. Or both.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: For never having a speaking role outside of a few odd specials and generally just setting up for gags, Penelope has a surprisingly large fanbase herself, to the point some wish that the writers would let her step out of being Pepé's co-star and become one of the Looney Tunes in her own right, which was obliged in Space Jam: A New Legacy, in which she is revealed to have joined the TuneSquad in a trailer. However, in the final film, she, like Pepé, has been Exiled from Continuity.
• Fair for Its Day: Like most of Looney Tunes' parodies, Pepé's status as a comical rapist is the result of Pop Culture Osmosis, as his aggressive flirting was meant to be a parody of equally chauvinistic Handsome Lech male protagonists in romantic comedies from the early 20th century (and according to some sources, a Stealth Insult to a '50's Warner Bros executive who got too hands-on with his secretaries). The fact that the women of Pepé's affection always react accordingly to his behavior, whereas the love interests in the movies being parodied simply get worn down before conceding to the man's persistence, arguably makes his cartoons less offensive than what they're derivative of. Divorced from this, however, it's easy to just read him as a creep.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: According to model sheets, the chihuahua on Scent-imental Over You is named Fifi. Guess what's the first name of Pepé's counterpart in Tiny Toon Adventures is?
• Memetic Molester: He's always stalking after cats, holding them close, and planting forceful kisses on them... you know the deal. And Penelope Pussycat, one of his victims, turns into this on three occasions when she turns the tables on Pepé and pursues him.
  • There is a short which ends revealing that Pepé has Penelope chained to his bed. A much more innocent time, to be sure.
• Parody Displacement:
  • Not that many people know this, but Pepé Le Pew was based on Charles Boyer's character Pepe Le Moko from the movie Algiers (which was actually referenced in a background gag on "The Cats' Bah").
  • The beginning of "The Cats' Bah" is a parody of the original 1950s TV version of The Continental (way before Christopher Walken would make a recurring sketch out of it on Saturday Night Live).
• Popular with Furries: Pepé and Penelope both have a noticeable fanbase with furries. Pepé less so, although some are swayed by his Casanova Wannabe personality, whereas Penelope has loads of Self-Fanservice and Rule 34 art dedicated to her, often making her less submissive than in canon. It helps that Carrotblanca puts her in a more seductive and domineering role.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Pepe x Penelope vs Penelope x Sylvester vs Pepe x Sylvester. Pepe has the most history being madly in love with Penelope, with several shorts ending with Penelope turnimg the tables on him. Sylvester is shown as a love interest to Penelope in Carrotblanca, where he tells off Pepe for his unwanted touching of her. And there have also been multiple instances where Pepe has treated Sylvester no differently that he does Penelope. It also helps that both are tuxedo cats who can never catch a break. And then there's the scene in Tweety's High Flying Adventure where Pepe flirts with both Penelope and Sylvester.
• Spiritual Successor: On Tiny Toon Adventures, there's Fifi La Fume, who acts just like Pepé (except that she likes it when men go after her), right down to mistaking black and white striped animals for male skunks (though it was revealed that she has a crush on Pepé Le Pew on an episode where Elmyra mistakes Fifi for a cat). However, she is much different than Pepé in other aspects, most notably that she interacts with the other Tiny Toons much more often (while Pepé rarely interacted with any of the other Looney Tunes in the Golden Age shorts. Modern revivals either don't have Pepé at all or do have him interacting with the other characters), is a lot more fleshed out character-wise, doesn't chase people nearly as often as Pepe did, and actually uses her stink as a weapon (although later on Pepé himself would sometimes use this trait in a way, such as in Space Jam).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Suffice to say, many people were enraged at the news that Pepé would be removed from the Looney Tunes franchise (until further notice) for the controversy over his antics progressively been viewed by some as sexual harassment.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: This is a common criticism of the shorts formulaic nature as a skunk unaware of how bad they smell can be used in many different comedic situations rather than just being an Abhorrent Admirer. This is also levied against Warner Bros for simply cutting the character rather than using him in more interesting ways.
• Values Dissonance: Not only do these cartoons perpetuate the (now long-dead) stereotype that French men are womanizers who never bathe, but Pepé himself is hardly seen as charmingly naïve in the 21st century and more of a stalker and rapist, and there have been a number of fanart in which Pepé is slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit for the exact same kind of "romance" he attempted in the 1940s. There are fans who like him more as an adult once they realize how politically incorrect the concept is, however. Because of such values dissonance, in 2021, it was announced that Pepé will be Exiled from Continuity, not appearing in Space Jam: A New Legacy and any future projects barring a cameo in Animaniacs (2020) which lampshades his exile.
• The Woobie: Penelope, and any other cat character who has had the misfortune of being painted in skunk colors and left to be harassed by Pepé. In cases such as "Odor-able Kitty" and "Scent-imental Over You" the victims actually had it pretty bad before they even met him.

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