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The chase goes on with each new mission
With backdrops aplenty, globally
And through it all they're in contention
Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries!
The Theme Song

The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries was the second original television series of the 1990s to be spun off from the Looney Tunes shorts (the first being Taz-Mania). It ran on Kids' WB! from 1995 through 2000.

The final episode pairing, "The Tail End' and "This is the End", never aired on Kids' WB, instead premiering on Cartoon Network on December 18, 2002.

The series centers on the adventures of Looney Tunes stars Sylvester, Tweety, and Hector the bulldog, and their owner Granny. Each episode, they are on vacation or called to some location where they have to solve a mystery going on, hence the series' title. Each episode starts with someone calling "the greatest detective in the world" to solve a case. Said detective is always unavailable, so they give up and settle for Granny. She takes her three pets with her wherever she goes, unaware of their endless conflict.

Actually, Granny does most of the detective work, but her pets do provide help from time to time. Of course, during all this, Sylvester is always trying to eat Tweety, but Hector, taking the role of the bird's bodyguard, is always making sure he doesn't.

Many of the supporting characters had guest appearances and cameos as the episodes went on. Cool Cat, a character in the later Warner Bros.-Seven Arts shorts, or something in his likeness appeared in just about every episode as a cameo.

While the first season featured episode-long plots based around the mysteries, the following seasons split the shows into two 10-minute segments that focused less on mysteries and more on the group's globe-trotting adventures, most being based around of older cartoons.

The series is animated by three different studios: Seoul, South-Korea (39 episodes), TMS, Japan (8 episodes) and Koko, South-Korea (5 episodes).

On February 17, 2021, it was announced Tweety will star in "Tweety Mysteries", a series similar to this except that it would be a live-action/animated hybrid. However, on December 2022, it was announced that the series was scrapped.


Tropes present:

  • Abdicate the Throne: In "Hold the Lyin' King Please", some lions wanted to depose their King because their food reserves (read: game) were running low. The King wouldn't mind abdicating except that it wasn't allowed. He had to die before a new King rose. He instead tricked Sylvester into switching places with him. (Which was possible thanks to Paper-Thin Disguise) The food was eventually found inside the cave of a lion who planned to usurp the throne but decided the current King wasn't all that bad when compared to Sylvester.
  • Accidental Public Confession:
    • After Granny finds a flea that's been making crop circles in the Martin brothers' wheat field, said flea jumps onto Curt, who becomes so itchy that he accidentally confesses that he trained it to make those crop circles in the first place.
    • In "Fair's Fair", upon realizing that her pie recipe has been tampered with, Betsy Cracker complains out loud that there are regular berries in her pie, which causes the judge of the baking contest to question her.
  • Adaptation Name Change: Giovanni Jones goes by Mario Stanza in this series.
  • Affectionate Parody: The whole series is one to Murder, She Wrote, with Granny as a parody of Jessica Fletcher. "A Ticket To Crime" is one to Murder by Death.
  • All Just a Dream: The final episode "This is the End" has Sylvester finally eat that darn canary and causing a lot of problems in doing so, but it eventually turns out that Sylvester only dreamed it all.
  • Ancient Artifact: In Good Bird Hunting, Sylvester finds an ancient relic that lets him grow taller and muscular to fend off Pete Puma from eating Tweety with mixed results. Granny ends up taking the artifact away.
  • Animals Fear Neutering: In "The Fifty Karat Furball", when Tweety starts to help Sylvester get the I of Istanbul out of his stomach, he tells Sylvester that he will be fixed in no time. Sylvester panics at the mention of "fixed", which causes Tweety to acknowledge that he may have made a poor choice of words.
  • Animated Actors: "This is the End" depicts Granny, Sylvester, Tweety, and Hector as actors for the show.
  • Art Evolution: This was one of many shows from the late 90s/early 2000s that started with traditional animation cels, then switched to digital ink and paint by the end (although only the last five episodes). The backgrounds also gradually became more and more simplified until they resembled the low budget cartoons Warner Bros. did in the 60s.
  • Artifact Title: By the second season, the show pretty much stops being about solving mysteries, but the title and theme tune never change.
  • Bankruptcy Barrel: In "It's a Plaid, Plaid, Plaid, Plaid World", all the Scotsmen are shown wearing barrels because the plaid they use to make their kilts have been stolen.
  • Beach Episode: "Hawaii 33-1/3" takes place at a Hawaiian beach and even features some curvaceous women in bikinis.
  • Big Brother Instinct: Hector is willing to keep Tweety safe from Sylvester.
  • Big Eater: Sylvester tends to think with his stomach, and can pack away large amounts of food if given the chance.
  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: In "Froggone It," the gang solves a mystery on the Warner Bros. studio lot. Granny warns Sylvester not to get lost or "they'll put you in another basketball movie."
  • Brick Joke: Occurs in the first episode "The Cat Who Knew Too Much" when Sylvester gets a window slammed on his fingers and remarks that he'll never play the cello again. Later in the episode, he prepares to play one while pretending to be part of a band with Granny, which causes him to say to the audience "So I was wrong".
  • Bruiser with a Soft Center: Hector has become this. He serves as a loyal companion to Granny and protector of Tweety and, on rare occasions, Sylvester.
  • The Bus Came Back: Some of the Seven Arts-era characters finally reappear. Cool Cat has a cameo in at least every episode, and Spooky haunts Sylvester in "What's the Frequency, Kitty?".
  • Buffoonish Tomcat: That being Sylvester of course.
  • Butt-Monkey: Sylvester, but he tends to bring it upon himself.
  • The Cameo: Like most Looney Tunes shows, several other classic (usually somewhat obscure) characters would appear in certain episodes at times. Sometimes they'd even be central to the plot.
    • Cool Cat or a background object in his likeness appears in almost every episode.
    • Henry Limpet appears in "Something Fishy Around Here". As part of a buffet.
  • Cassandra Truth: Oftentimes Granny and her pets traveled to spooky places like a mummy's tomb or a haunted house, and Sylvester would be the only one who saw the danger they were in. Naturally no one believed him.
  • Cats Are Mean: Sylvester, par for the course, is always intent on eating Tweety and isn't very scrupulous in general.
  • Cheaters Never Prosper: The whole reason Betsy Cracker has won every pie-baking contest because she'd been cheating by using berry pie filling instead of regular berries. When Granny finds out, she tricks Betsy into using regular berries. The minute Betsy is exposed, she's disqualified.
  • The Chew Toy: Even when Hector isn't beating him senseless, even the universe itself likes to make sure Sylvester gets hurt as often as possible. Not that he doesn't deserve it.
  • Christmas Episode: "It Happened One Night Before Christmas" in season 1 and "Feather Christmas" in season 4.
  • Clueless Mystery: Often the writers didn't play fair and Granny would solve the mystery with clues that the viewers couldn't see until The Unmasking.
  • Cold Opening: A Running Gag concerned victims phoning the top detective to solve their cases, but the top detective is unavailable for whatever reason, so they relay the client to Granny instead.
  • Cool Old Lady: Granny, as always, is one of the coolest. Her career as a detective definitely helps.
  • Decoy Protagonist: In the first season, at least—though Sylvester and Tweety's names were on the title, the show was really more about Granny than them.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: "Suite Mysteries of Wife" is shot almost entirely in black and white due to the episode being a send-up of Alfred Hitchcock's work. Humorously lampshaded at one point, wherein Tweety pulls a switch with an "Out of Order" sign on it. Turns out it's the switch that turns the color back on, and all the colors are very much not what they're supposed to be.
  • Detective Animal: A mostly-accidental version. The bickering among Sylvester, Tweety and often Hector causes clues to appear in front of Granny, who then solves the mysteries herself.
  • Detectives Follow Footprints: The intro animation is all about this.
  • Deus ex machina: Parodied in the episode "Platinum Wheel of Fortune", which takes place at the Monte Carlo Casino. At the end of the episode, when Granny needs one final vital clue to solve the mystery, Tweety obtains it from a slot machine called "Machine du Clues".
  • Digging to China: In the episode Rasslin' Rhapsody, Granny tumbles the crusher through the ring where he likely he passed from the center of the earth to china but the trope is subverted as he actually landed in a post soviet union Europe country instead.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: In a flashback to Sylvester's first birthday, it's revealed that Granny punished him for trying to eat Tweety (his birthday gift) by giving him no more birthdays until he learns to get along with Tweety.
  • End-of-Series Awareness: The final episode had Sylvester dream about the show coming to an end after he finally eats Tweety. The episode is even called "This is the End".
  • Engineered Public Confession: Tweety engineers one in "Double Take", hovering over the bad guy's head with a microphone as he blabs his plan to Sylvester.
  • Episode Title Card: Every episode had a title card.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a show staring Sylvester Cat and Tweety Bird. They solve mysteries.
  • Expository Theme Tune: The theme song sums up the basic premise of the show, that Sylvester, Tweety, and Granny travel the world solving mysteries.
  • Expy: The mansion which appears in the TV opening looks suspiciously like the original Maniac Mansion. See here.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: The last episode "This is the End" has Sylvester actually eat Tweety, which results in a whole fallout that reached world crisis levels just because Tweety was gone. Good thing it was just a dream of Sylvester's.
  • Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Count Blood Count is depicted this way in the episode "Fangs for the Memories". He's the episode's client rather than the antagonist and is shown to be very friendly towards Granny and her pets.
  • Grand Finale: The final episode "This is the End", where Sylvester appears to finally eat that darn canary, but at the cost of eventually getting their show cancelled. It eventually turns out that Sylvester only dreamed that he ate Tweety. The episode is even chock full of End-of-Series Awareness to boot.
  • I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: In "Is Paris Stinking?", Pepe Le Pew stole all the perfume of Paris and replaced it with his own smell. When caught, he said he'd not reveal it's hidden at the old chocolate factory.
  • In the Blood: One episode features a distant cousin of PepĂ© Le Pew. That cousin behaves like Pepe and has a car that hops around the same way Pepe does while chasing female skunks or whatever Pepe and his cousin mistake for them. Pepe's cousin even mentioned the kinship to explain the behavior similarity.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
    • Though very rarely, Sylvester will have moments where he can protect even Tweety when need be.
    • Hector can be quite the brute, especially towards Sylvester, but his soft side can show, even around Sylvester sometimes.
  • Karma Houdini:
    • Hector. Even when Sylvester isn't going after Tweety (or if he is, Hector will take his beatings on him a little too far), he will still find every opportunity to beat the cat senseless and Granny will rarely punish him for it.
    • Implied with Curt in "Family Circles", who confesses that he was responsible for the crop circles. While it's unknown if Curt ever did get a punishment for doing so, Punpkinhead decides that the only thing to do is give his brother a flea bath because the flea Curt trained to ruin the crops jumped onto him.
  • "Kick Me" Prank: In the episode "Blackboard Jumble", Granny is at one point seen with a "Kick Me" sign on her back.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Sylvester and Pete Puma's fight in "Good Bird Hunting" is interrupted by Cool Cat, who grabs Tweety and simply walks off. Tweety acknowledges to the audience how they had to stick Cool Cat into this episode somehow.
  • Laugh Track: Everything Tweety says are followed by this in the episode, "El Dia de los Pussygatos".
  • Little Old Lady Investigates: The basic premise of the show is that Granny is a detective.
  • Mockstery Tale: The mysteries were always more of a framing device for the usual "cat-versus-bird-versus-dog" antics of the original Looney Tunes shorts, and many of them turned out to be non-existent or unimportant to the plot.
  • Mooning: In "Curse of De Nile", Colonel Rimfire reads hieroglyphs that read "Look behind you", with the word "behind" represented by an image of a mouse grinning while exposing his butt.
  • Mumbling Brando: Owns Kanary Islands in "Yes, We Have No Canaries"
  • Mushroom Samba: Sylvester ends up having a trippy dream sequence in "El Dia de los Pussygatos" after Tweety tricks him into eating a chili pepper.
  • Mythology Gag: In "Seeing Double", Tweety meets another bird with the early Tweety design (such as in A Tale of Two Kitties), although the character here is named Orson.
  • Nixon Mask: The episode "Spooker of the House" features a villain impersonating the ghost of William Howard Taft to scare the President away. After being unmasked, he says that he chose President Taft because, as the largest President in history, he'd make an impressive ghost and the costume shop was out of Nixon masks.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed:
    • In "Keep Your Pantheon", the Greek god Zeus is depicted as a caricature of Charlton Heston.
    • Rotha Khan from "The Rotha Khan" has a voice like John Wayne and even says "pilgrim" at one point.
  • Pet the Dog: Sylvester's always trying to eat Tweety Bird, but he is sometimes nice to the canary.
    • In "Whatever Happened to Shorty Twang?", Sylvester asks Tweety if he is alright after accidentally hurting him.
    • In the final episode "This is the End", the first thing Sylvester does after waking from his dream of eating Tweety and inadvertently ending the show because of it is to hug Tweety and tell him that he loves him.
  • A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: "You're Thor?" had Vikings a thousand years too late.
  • Poke the Poodle: "London Broiled" features the Shropshire Slasher, who's made out to be a major threat by the tour guide... but when he's finally unmasked, Granny reveals his only "crime" is using a felt-tipped marker to slash prices in grocery stores and dress shops, and that nobody ever feared him.
  • Private Eye Monologue: Sylvester sometimes opens episodes with these kinds of narrations, since he has as much involvement in solving the cases as Granny, Tweety, and Hector.
  • Running Gag: Cool Cat cameos.
  • Scared of What's Behind You: In "Sea You Later", the main characters are underwater and Tweety tries to befriend some fish who flee, making him wonder if his breath is bad. It turns out there's a cat fish behind him. Unwilling to let Tweety become somebody else's meal, Sylvester tries to shoo the cat fish away and believes to have done so until he sees the school of dog fish behind him.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Soap Punishment: "Moscow Side Story" had Tweety inform Sylvester that Granny would wash his mouth out with soap after hearing the cat say "bolshoi".
  • Spiritual Successor: The Direct-To-Video movie Tweety's High-Flying Adventure.
  • Title Drop: Sylvester says the episode's title at the end of "Keep Your Pantheon".
  • Unfortunate Names: Moo Goo Gai Pan, who was born in a Chinese restaurant and accidentally given the name of the daily special.
  • Unishment: Happens to Granny's nephew Paul Freleng in "A Good Nephew is Hard to Find" when he is revealed to be behind the Kaiju sightings. His punishment is 200 hours of community service where he works as a costumed carnival mascot, but he ends up enjoying it so much that he signs up for a thousand more hours.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Most of the crimes are committed via classic Looney Tunes slapstick or in some otherwise bizarre and outlandish manner. Some of them are still perceived as accidents at first, even when they happen right in front of Granny herself.
  • Vertigo Effect: Parodied in one episode.
  • Who Even Needs a Brain?: Sylvester experiences Type I of this trope in "This is The Kitty". Hector and the Jack Webb pastiche yank Tweety out of Sylvester's mouth, but also remove his brain in the process. After having his brain removed, Sylvester just stands there drooling.
  • With Friends Like These...: Sylvester, Tweety, Hector and Granny are a team of crime-solving supersleuths (though Granny does most of the work). This does little to stop Sylvester from trying to eat Tweety all the time, or Hector from beating on Sylvester constantly whether or not he's actually tried to eat Tweety recently.

Alternative Title(s): Sylvester And Tweety Mysteries

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