History WesternAnimation / WoodyWoodpecker

* SeldomSeenSpecies: Woody, of course.

* RageAgainstTheAuthor: In ''The Pen Is Flightier Than the Sword'', Buzz and Woody fight over a graphics tablet and change the animation around it.

* BerserkButton: Woody doesn't like cheesecake. The Loan Shark from ''The Loan Stranger'' learned this the hard way.

* AlternativeForeignThemeSong: The Japanese version had a different [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBR3fnZ-Qso opening theme]], sung by Woody's Japanese voice actress, Kumiko Watanabe. It also had a different ending theme as heard [[http://www.nicozon.net/watch/sm17073869 here]].

''Woody Woodpecker'' is an iconic cartoon star, the mascot and [[BreakthroughHit most successful cartoon series]] of the Creator/WalterLantz and Creator/{{Universal}} studios, from his [[BreakoutCharacter breakout debut]] in the WesternAnimation/AndyPanda short "WesternAnimation/{{Knock Knock|1940}}" [[note]]Although ''WesternAnimation/TheCrackedNut'', released the following year, was the debut of his own series.[[/note]], in [[UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfAnimation 1940]], to the end of his theatrical run in [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfAnimation 1972]], lasting for 198 shorts, supplemented by appearances in comics, merchandise, a long-running TV anthology show, a short-lived contemporary TV revival, and a [[Film/WoodyWoodpecker live-action/CGI feature film]] and a late 2018 Website/YouTube revival, thus establishing him as an animation {{Long Runner|s}}. In 2020, the character turned 80 yearswa and a second season was released.

He is famous for being a prominent example of the [[ThePrankster Heckler-Screwball]] type cartoon character, up there with masters like WesternAnimation/DaffyDuck and, of course, [[WesternAnimation/TexAveryMGMCartoons Screwy Squirrel]] himself. He has starred in many remarkable cartoons, most notably ''WesternAnimation/TheBarberOfSeville'', which made it onto the list of The50GreatestCartoons, along with his first solo short, ''WesternAnimation/TheCrackedNut'', which made it as a runner-up.

* [[WesternAnimation/TheCrackedNut Woody Woodpecker / The Cracked Nut]]: Woody's first solo entry. One reissued print renamed it "The Cracked Nut", which is what this short is usually called nowadays to avoid confusion. Runner-up on The50GreatestCartoons list.

* WesternAnimation/TheBarberOfSeville: Creator/ShamusCulhane's first Woody Woodpecker short. One of The50GreatestCartoons. Also the last Woody with green eyes until 1947. Woody's jerk tendencies were played up considerably from here on out, with sheer determination replacing his previously nutty, haphazard nature. He also recieved a major design overhaul in this short, doing away with his original ghoulish look in favor of a more streamlined, slicker design.

** Buzz Buzzard's resemblance to an actual buzzard is completely nonexistent, since he has black feathers on his head and an oversized beak. His design starting with 1951's "Puny Express" is even worse since he now lacks feathers on his head.

* LoopholeAbuse: In the short ''Ski For Two'', Woody attempts to enter a lodge owned by Wally Walrus, only to be rejected due to the lodge only allowing those with reservations to stay there. So Woody promptly gives him lots of reservations...or rather, reservations Woody has made to ''other'' resorts and lodges. Wally is immediately on to Woody's sham and tosses him out right away.

* Inevitable Waterfall: Like ''Niagara Fools'', in ''Fall Guy'', Woody tries to drop the falls in a barrel, this time in Iguazu Falls, Brazil.

* AnimationBump: The 1940-43 shorts (the majority directed, often uncredited, by Alex Lovy) boast extremely ungainly and uneven visuals, hampered by crude, lumpen character designs, inconsistent inking and a poor grasp (possibly stemming from botched inbetweening) of the 'squash-and-stretch' motion indigenous to then-contemporary Hollywood animation, leading to an amalgamation of stiffness and overly-rubbery fluidity. The animation (particularly the design and posing) improved to a degree when Creator/ShamusCulhane joined the studio (alongside a slew of former Disney artists such as layout artist Art Heinemann and animators Emery Hawkins, Pat Matthews, Dick Lundy (six months prior to his eventual directing stint at Lantz) and Grim Natwick), but his efforts were still undermined by bad inkers and sloppy in-between work. By 1948, increased budgets (owing to a shift in distributors from Universal to United Artists) and the direction of Culhane's replacement Dick Lundy finally smoothed the shorts' animation out to a more slick, graceful aesthetic (no doubt aided by the hiring of top-flight Disney and MGM animators such as Ed Love, Fred Moore and Ken O'Brien) but then started to deteriorate again after the studio's temporary shutdown in 1949. The animation quality remained acceptable (if spartan and budget-constrained) under Lundy's replacement, Don Patterson, upon the studio's re-opening in 1950, but grew steadily worse and worse when Patterson left and was replaced by Paul J. Smith and the returning Alex Lovy. Surprisingly enough the animation (albeit not Smith's direction) did improve near the end of the studio's life, when Smith recruited some better animators (such as Disney veterans Volus Jones and Al Coe) in 1971--72, but it was really too little, too late.

* AnimationBump: The 1940-43 shorts (the majority directed, often uncredited, by Alex Lovy) boast extremely ungainly and uneven visuals, hampered by crude, lumpen character designs, inconsistent inking and a poor grasp (possibly stemming from botched inbetweening) of the 'squash-and-stretch' motion indigenous to then-contemporary Hollywood animation, leading to an amalgamation of stiffness and overly-rubbery fluidity. The animation improved to a degree when Creator/ShamusCulhane joined the studio (alongside a slew of former Disney artists such as layout artist Art Heinemann and animators Emery Hawkins, Pat Matthews, Dick Lundy (six months prior to his eventual directing stint at Lantz) and Grim Natwick), but his efforts were still undermined by bad inkers and sloppy in-between work. By 1948, increased budgets (owing to a shift in distributors from Universal to United Artists) and the direction of Culhane's replacement Dick Lundy finally smoothed the shorts' animation out to a more slick, graceful aesthetic (no doubt aided by the hiring of top-flight Disney and MGM animators such as Ed Love, Fred Moore and Ken O'Brien) but then started to deteriorate again after the studio's temporary shutdown in 1949. The animation quality remained acceptable (if spartan and budget-constrained) under Lundy's replacement, Don Patterson, upon the studio's re-opening in 1950, but grew steadily worse and worse when Patterson left and was replaced by Paul J. Smith and the returning Alex Lovy. Surprisingly enough the animation (albeit not Smith's direction) did improve near the end of the studio's life, when Smith recruited some better animators (such as Disney veterans Volus Jones and Al Coe) in 1971--72, but it was really too little, too late.

* AnimationBump: The early shorts by Lantz and Lovy had very sloppy, off-model prone animation. The animation improved to a degree when Creator/ShamusCulhane joined the studio (alongside a slew of former Disney artists such as layout artist Art Heinemann and animators Emery Hawkins, Pat Matthews, Dick Lundy (six months prior to his eventual directing stint at Lantz) and Grim Natwick), but his efforts were still undermined by bad inkers and sloppy in-between work. By 1948, increased budgets (owing to a shift in distributors from Universal to United Artists) and the direction of Culhane's replacement Dick Lundy finally smoothed the shorts' animation out to a more slick, graceful aesthetic (no doubt aided by the hiring of top-flight Disney and MGM animators such as Ed Love, Fred Moore and Ken O'Brien) but then started to deteriorate again after the studio's temporary shutdown in 1949. The animation quality remained acceptable (if spartan and budget-constrained) under Lundy's replacement, Don Patterson, upon the studio's re-opening in 1950, but grew steadily worse and worse when Patterson left and was replaced by Paul J. Smith and the returning Alex Lovy. Surprisingly enough the animation (albeit not Smith's direction) did improve near the end of the studio's life, when Smith recruited some better animators (such as Disney veterans Volus Jones and Al Coe) in 1971--72, but it was really too little, too late.

* AnimationBump: The early shorts by Lantz and Lovy had very sloppy, off-model prone animation. The animation improved to a degree when Creator/ShamusCulhane joined the studio, but his efforts were still undermined by bad inkers and sloppy in-between work. By 1948, increased budgets (owing to a shift in distributors from Universal to United Artists) and the direction of Culhane's replacement Dick Lundy finally smoothed the shorts' animation out to a more slick, graceful aesthetic (no doubt aided by the hiring of top-flight Disney and MGM animators such as Ed Love, Fred Moore and Ken O'Brien) but then started to deteriorate again after the studio's temporary shutdown in 1949. The animation quality remained acceptable (if spartan and budget-constrained) under Lundy's replacement, Don Patterson, upon the studio's re-opening in 1950, but grew steadily worse and worse when Patterson left and was replaced by Paul J. Smith and the returning Alex Lovy. Surprisingly enough the animation (albeit not Smith's direction) did improve near the end of the studio's life, when Smith recruited some better animators (such as Disney veterans Volus Jones and Al Coe) in 1971--72, but it was really too little, too late.

Despite this setback, his theatrical serials are still fondly remembered by classic animation fans and he is still the official mascot of Universal Studios to this day.[[note]]Though the position was stolen from him by ''WesternAnimation/AnAmericanTail'''s Fievel from the late 1980s into the 1990s. Just when it seemed he had earned it back, Creator/IlluminationEntertainment's mascots - [[WesternAnimation/DespicableMe the Minions]] - snatched it from him in the 2010s.[[/note]] The series lingered in a state of hiatus for several years until a new CG feature-length Woody Woodpecker feature was made by Universal in 2017, getting a theatrical release in Brazil and getting a direct-to-video and Netflix release in the US. A new Website/YouTube-exclusive webseries revival of the character is also due to release in late 2018.

''Woody Woodpecker'' is an iconic cartoon star, the mascot and [[BreakthroughHit most successful cartoon series]] of the Creator/WalterLantz and Creator/{{Universal}} studios, from his [[BreakoutCharacter breakout debut]] in the WesternAnimation/AndyPanda short "WesternAnimation/{{Knock Knock|1940}}" [[note]]Although ''WesternAnimation/TheCrackedNut'', released the following year, was the debut of his own series.[[/note]], in [[UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfAnimation 1940]], to the end of his theatrical run in [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfAnimation 1972]], lasting for 198 shorts, supplemented by appearances in comics, merchandise, a long-running TV anthology show, a short-lived contemporary TV revival, and a [[Film/WoodyWoodpecker live-action/CGI feature film]] and a late 2018 Website/YouTube revival, thus establishing him as an animation {{Long Runner|s}}. In 2020, the character turns 80 and a second season is released.

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: At the end of "Pinheads", when Woody finds Buzz's wanted poster, he calls the police for the reward. But with the bowling alley where they are being 500 miles away from the nearest civilization, the officer on the other end [[PoliceAreUseless initially doesn't pay him any mind]] despite the wanted poster. Then Woody mentions that Buzz's car, the car that Woody just bet and lost against him, is parked in a Red Zone. One BigWhat and two seconds later, the police have Buzz surrounded.

** In the Brazilian Portuguese dub, he actually tells the elf to "go to ''hell''!"

* The Coo Coo Bird: A rare solo Woody cartoon. This short is suspiciously similar in story to the 1941 DonaldDuck short "Early to Bed".

** Buzz Buzzard, a character director Dick Lundy added to the Woody cartoons shortly after his arrival at Lantz's studio, seems to be one of Ben Buzzard, a character Dick Lundy made for the short "The Flying Jalopy", a DonaldDuck cartoon Lundy worked on when he was at Disney.

* MythologyGag: Woody becomes the 1940 version in ''Winnie's Wish''.

-->'''Dooley:''' I hate you!
-->'''Woody:''' I like you! (smooch)

* UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfAnimation
* UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfAnimation

* TricksterArchetype: Woody to a tee, with his zany energy and overall mischievous spirit.

* RInevitable WaterfallelatedInTheAdaptation: Knothead and Splinter appear to be related to Winnie instead of Woody in this series.

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: "The Screwdriver" has Woody openly mocking and harassing a police officer, as well as getting away with it in the end by having the cop thrown in the nuthouse. This is odd, considering UsefulNotes/TheHaysCode rules explicitly forbid {{Karma Houdini}}s, particularly when it came to mocking the law.

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: Due to Fox Kids policies, Woody was not allowed to peck people on the head. However, they ''did'' manage to sneak in Woody pecking someone's head once in a blue moon.

* Inevitable Waterfall: Like ''Niagara Fools'', in ''FallGuy'', Woody tries to drop the falls in a barrel, this time in Iguazu Falls, Brazil.