Pink Panther (character)

The Pink Panther
The Pink Panther
Portrayed by	Rich Little (in Sink Pink and Pink Ice)
In-universe information
Gender	Male

The Pink Panther is the main and title character in a series of animated short films. The character originally appeared in the opening and closing credit sequences of the 1963 live-action feature film The Pink Panther. The popularity of the character spawned a series of animated short films, and the character would appear in the opening sequence of every film in The Pink Panther series except for A Shot in the Dark and Inspector Clouseau. It starred in 124 shorts (either theatrical or made-for-television), 10 television shows and 3 television specials (primetime).

As of September 2007, the cartoons can be viewed on Boomerang, Voom HD Networks' Animania HD, Teletoon Retro, Hulu and the full collection has been made available on DVD.

As of October 2009, Cartoon Network has been running a spot on The Pink Panther weekdays at 12:30 PM.

DePatie-Freleng/United Artists cartoons

The animated Pink Panther character's initial appearance in the live action film's title sequence, directed by Friz Freleng, was such a success with audiences and United Artists that the studio signed Freleng and his DePatie-Freleng Enterprises studio to a multi-year contract for a series of Pink Panther theatrical cartoon shorts.

The first entry in the series, 1964's The Pink Phink, featured the Panther harassing his foil, a little white moustached man who is actually a caricature of Friz Freleng (this character is officially known as "The Man" ), by constantly trying to paint the little man's blue house pink. The Pink Phink won the 1964 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, and subsequent shorts in the series, usually featuring the Pink Panther opposite the little man, were successful releases.

In an early series of Pink Panther animated cartoons, the Pink Panther generally remained silent, speaking only in two theatrical shorts, Sink Pink and Pink Ice. Rich Little provided the Panther's voice in the latter shorts, modelling it on that of David Niven (who had portrayed Clouseau's jewel-thief nemesis in the original live-action film). Years later Little would overdub Niven's voice for Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther.

All of the animated Pink Panther shorts utilized the distinctive jazzy theme music composed by Henry Mancini for the 1963 feature film, with additional scores composed by Walter Greene or William Lava.

The Pink Panther Show

In the fall of 1969, the Pink Panther cartoons made their way to NBC television on shown Saturday mornings via The Pink Panther Show. NBC added a laugh track to the original cartoons, with Marvin Miller brought on as an off-camera narrator talking to the Pink Panther during bumper segments featuring the Pink Panther and The Inspector together.

Pink Panther shorts made after 1969 were produced for both broadcast and film release, typically appearing on television first, and released to theatres by United Artists. One version of the show was called The Think Pink Panther Show. A number of sister series joined The Pink Panther on movie screens and on the airwaves, among them The Ant and the Aardvark, The Tijuana Toads (a.k.a. The Texas Toads), Hoot Kloot, and Misterjaw (a.k.a. Mr. Jaws and Catfish). There were also a series of animated shorts called The Inspector, with the bumbling Clouseau inspired Inspector and his Spanish-speaking sidekick Sgt. Deux-Deux, whom the Inspector is forever correcting. ("Deux" is French for "two", meaning the little man's name is both a pun and a play on words, "two" appearing two times in the name.) Other DePatie-Freleng series included Roland and Rattfink, The Dogfather (a Godfather pastiche), with a canine Corleone family and two Tijuana Toads spinoffs, The Blue Racer and Crazylegs Crane.

In 1976, the half-hour series was revamped into a 90-minute format, as The Pink Panther Laugh and a Half Hour and a Half Show; this version included a live-action segment, where the show's host, comedian Lenny Schultz, would read letters and jokes from viewers. This version flopped, and would change back to the original half-hour version in 1977.

In 1978, after nine years on NBC, The Pink Panther moved to ABC, where it lasted one season before leaving the network realm entirely. The ABC version of the series featured sixteen episodes with 32 new Pink Panther cartoons, and 16 of Crazylegs Crane. The 32 new Pink Panther cartoons were eventually released to theatres by United Artists.

Post-Saturday morning airings

DFE films was the last studio to produce new theatrical cartoons, finally ending production on The Pink Panther and the other series in 1980. That year, United Artists Television syndicated a half-hour, repackaged version of the series, complete with original theatrical intros, outros and NBC-produced commercial bumpers, to local stations. Due to contractual obligations, many stations showed the series in the evening, as opposed to mornings or afternoons. The individual cartoons were syndicated to local stations beginning in the fall of 1982, with the NBC-added laugh track removed from the soundtracks.

A single cartoon preceded the main feature in older James Bond VHS releases. In late 2004 in the UK and later in February 2006 in the US, all of the Pink Panther cartoons were released on DVD from MGM Home Entertainment. Twenty-eight of the cartoons were featured on the second disc of the two-DVD set of the Pink Panther 2, starring Steve Martin released in June 2009.

Richard Williams's studio animated the character in the credit sequences of two of the theatrical Panther features, The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) and The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). All the other films in the series feature animation by DePatie-Freleng.

Further information: [[:List of The Pink Panther cartoons]]

Later television shows and specials

After ending the Pink Panther's theatrical run, DePatie-Freleng produced a series of three prime time Pink Panther television specials for ABC. The first of the specials was 1978's A Pink Christmas, which premiered on ABC during the Panther's theatrical run for movie theaters. It featured the Panther in New York being cold and hungry looking for a juicy holiday dinner. Two other primetime specials premiered after the theatrical shorts ended in theaters, 1980's Olympinks and 1981's Pink At First Sight (under Marvel Productions). In November of late 2007, the three specials were released on a single disc DVD collection titled, The Pink Panther: A Pink Christmas from MGM Home Entertainment/20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

The studio was sold to Marvel Comics in 1981, and became Marvel Productions. In 1984, the Pink Panther was licensed to Hanna-Barbera Productions, who produced the short-lived Saturday morning series, Pink Panther and Sons, in which the still-silent Pink Panther was given two talking sons, Pinky and Panky.

Yet another new series of cartoons, called The Pink Panther, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Animation, premiered in Syndication in 1993, and had the Pink Panther speaking with the voice of Matt Frewer (of Max Headroom fame). Unlike the classic animated shorts, not all episode titles contained the word "pink", although many instead contained the word "panther".

In July 2007, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Jordan's Rubicon animation company began co-production of the animated series Pink Panther and Pals portraying a teenaged panther and his friends. The 26 episode TV series is slated to premiere worldwide in Fall 2009 on the Cartoon Network.

In October 2009 the original DePatie-Freleng/United Artists episodes began airing on the Cartoon Network.

In popular culture

• In Spain, a Pantera Rosa cake is sold. It is coated in pink.

Cultural references

• Pink Panther Show intro theme was used by Nike in a viral campaign of Pink Mercurial Vapor IV football boot using the French football star Franck Ribery mimicking the character of the Pink Panther.
• As of today, The Pink Panther continues to be a friendly character in advertising. American television personality Regis Philbin can be seen in a commercial for Sweet'N Low talking to a taxi cab driver. After the camera changes the view, the audience realize that the driver is The Pink Panther.
• The character is also famous for appearing in commercials for Owens Corning insulation; which is colored pink. This was also parodied in an episode of Family Guy.

Critical notes

As Pink Panther historian Jerry Beck notes, "Classic animation pretty much died in the '60s, everyone had kind of bailed out. But his creators didn't rest on their laurels. They didn't make the cartoons to look like Warner Bros. cartoons, or Disney cartoons, or the UPA look of Mister Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing. They came up with their own clever new style. The only other important cartoon of the '60s was Yellow Submarine."

The Pink Panther was therefore a notable contribution to the animation art form. Top animation directors such as Hawley Pratt, Gerry Chiniquy, Robert McKimson, and Sid Marcus contributed to a distinctive style, supported by master story writer John W. Dunn. Produced after theatrical cartooning's golden age of the 1940s and 50s, they were constrained to the limited animation techniques applied to Saturday morning cartoons of 1960s and after. Within these limitations, the Pink Panther made creative use of absurd and surreal themes and visual puns and an almost completely wordless pantomime style, set to the ubiquitous Pink Panther theme and its variations by Henry Mancini. The overall approach is reminiscent of the classic silent movies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Cultural references were more muted and stylized, resulting in a cartoon with longer-term, more cross-cultural appeal not shared by contemporaries such as Yogi Bear and The Flintstones, with their greater reliance on contemporary American pop culture.

The Pink Panther also remained constrained to the classic six-minute form of theatrical shorts, while contemporaries expanded into longer, sitcom-like storylines, up to a full 30 minutes of broadcast TV in the case of The Flintstones.

Freleng's colleagues credit his sense of creative timing as a key element to the cartoon's artistic success. Freleng himself regarded the Pink Panther as his finest achievement and the character he most identified with, according to family and colleagues interviewed on the 2006 DVD release.

Co-stars and friends of the Pink Panther

See also List of The Pink Panther cartoons.

• The Inspector (Theatrical, 1965-1969)
• Roland and Rattfink (Theatrical, 1968-1971)
• The Ant and the Aardvark (Theatrical, 1969-1971)
• Tijuana Toads (Theatrical, 1969-1972)
• The Blue Racer (Theatrical, 1972-1974)
• Hoot Kloot (Theatrical, 1973-1974)
• The Dogfather (Theatrical, 1974-1976)
• Misterjaw (Television, 1976)
• Crazylegs Crane (Television, 1978)

Television appearances

List of animated shows

• The Pink Panther Show (NBC, 1969-1980 and various spinoffs)
• Pink Panther and Sons (1984-1985)
• The Pink Panther (Syndication, 1993-1995)
• Pink Panther and Pals (starting in 2009)

List of animated specials

• The Pink Panther in: A Pink Christmas (1978)
• The Pink Panther in: Olym-Pinks (1980)
• The Pink Panther in: Pink at First Sight (1981, Valentine's Day special)

External links

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