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Elmer J. Fudd is a fictional cartoon character and one of the most famous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters. He has one of the more convoluted and disputed origins in the Warner Brothers cartoon pantheon (second only to Bugs Bunny himself). His aim is to shoot Bugs, but he usually ends up seriously injuring himself.
His stock line is: "Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I'm hunting wabbits, heheheheheheh," although he does not say this exact line in every cartoon in which he appeared.
In 1937, Tex Avery introduced a new character in his cartoon short Egghead Rides Again. Egghead had a bulbous nose, funny/eccentric clothing, a voice like Joe Penner, and an egg-shaped head. Many cartoon historians believe that Egghead evolved into Elmer over a period of a couple of years.
Egghead made his second appearance in 1937's Little Red Walking Hood and then in 1938 teamed with Warner Brothers' newest cartoon star Daffy Duck in Daffy Duck and Egghead. Egghead continued to appear in a string of cartoons in 1938: The Isle of Pingo Pongo, Cinderella Meets Fella, and A-Lad-In Bagdad. However, it wasn't until A Feud There Was (1938) where his character was identified as "Elmer Fudd, Peacemaker", though he still maintained his Egghead-ish appearance.
In the 1939 cartoon Dangerous Dan McFoo, a new voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan was hired to provide the voice of the hero dog-character and it was in this cartoon that the popular "milk-sop" voice of Elmer Fudd was created. Elmer Fudd has long since remained the antagonistic force in all bugs bunny cartoons except for some very small ones....
In 1940, Egghead/Elmer's appearance was refined giving him a chin and a less bulbous nose (although still wearing Egghead's style of clothing) and Arthur Q. Bryan's "Dan McFoo" voice in what most people consider Elmer Fudd's first true appearance: a Chuck Jones short entitled Elmer's Candid Camera. Happy Rabbit drives Elmer insane. Later that year, He Appeared in Confederate Honey where his voice was still the same. He then appeared in A Wild Hare, Bugs appears, with a carrot, Brooklyn/Bronx accent, and "What's Up, Doc" all in place for the first time. Elmer has a better voice and a trimmer figure, too.
Elmer's role in these two films, that of would-be hunter, dupe and foil for Bugs, would remain his main role forever after, and although Bugs Bunny was called upon to outwit many more worthy opponents, Elmer somehow remained Bugs' classic nemesis, despite (or because of) his legendary gullibility, small size, short temper, and shorter attention span. Somehow knowing not only that Elmer would lose, but knowing how he would lose, made the confrontation, counterintuitively, more delicious. Despite being the antagonist, Elmer lacked the malice of a true villain.
Elmer was usually cast as a hapless big-game hunter, armed with a double-barreled shotgun and creeping through the woods "hunting wabbits." In a few cartoons, though, he assumed a completely different persona — a wealthy industrialist type, occupying a luxurious penthouse, or, in one episode involving a role reversal, a sanitarium — which Bugs would of course somehow find his way into. He appears in the video game Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time as the boss of the era Stone Age and in Bugs Bunny and Taz: Time Busters as the boss in the Vikings era.
For a short time in the early 1940s, Elmer's appearance was modified again. He became a heavy-set, beer-belly character, patterned after Arthur Q. Bryan's real-life appearance, and still chasing Bugs (or vice versa). Audiences did not accept a fat Fudd, so ultimately the slimmer version (which was only fat in the head, literally and figuratively) returned for good.
This time period also saw a temporary change in Elmer's relationship with Bugs Bunny. Instead of being the hunter, Elmer was the victim of unprovoked pestering by Bugs. In Wabbit Twouble, Bugs plays a number of gags on Elmer, advising the audience, "I do dis kind o' stuff to him all t'rough da picture!" Another episode, The Wacky Wabbit, finds Elmer focused on prospecting for gold which would be used to fund the World War II effort. Elmer sings "V for Victory" to the tune of "Oh! Susanna", with Bugs joining in just before starting to hassle Elmer.
Elmer would also appear frequently on the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures as a teacher at Acme Looniversity, where he was the idol and favorite teacher of Elmyra Duff, the slightly deranged animal lover who resembles Elmer both in basic head design and lack of intellect. Elmer also had a guest spot in the Histeria! episode "The Teddy Roosevelt Show" as Gutzon Borglum. This sketch depicts Elmer/Gutzon's construction of Mount Rushmore, accompanied by Borglum's son Lincoln, portrayed by Loud Kiddington.
Elmer took on a more villainous role in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which he is a secret agent for the Acme Corporation. In his scene, Elmer chases Bugs and Daffy through the paintings in the Louvre museum, taking on the different art styles as they do so. At the end, Elmer forgets to change back to his normal style after jumping out of the pointillism painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, allowing Bugs to easily disintegrate Elmer by blowing a fan at him. An even more villainous Elmer appeared in two episodes of Duck Dodgers as The Mother Fudd, an alien who would spread a disease that caused all affected by it to stand around laughing like Elmer.
Fudd was originally voiced by radio actor Arthur Q. Bryan, but after Bryan's death in 1959 the voice was reluctantly assumed by the versatile Mel Blanc (although other voice actors have alternated as Fudd's voice). Bryan's characterization remains the definitive one. He was never credited onscreen, because Blanc had a clause in his contract that required a screen credit. Blanc admitted in his autobiography that he found the voice difficult to get "right", and he never quite made it his own. In Speechless, the famous print issued following Blanc's death, Elmer is not shown among the characters bowing their heads in tribute to Blanc. Elmer has also been voiced by Hal Smith, Daws Butler, Greg Burson, Jeff Bergman, Billy West, Tom Kenny, and others over the years.
The best known Elmer Fudd cartoons include Chuck Jones' masterpiece What's Opera, Doc? (one of the few times Fudd succeeded in besting Bugs, and he feels bad about it), the Rossini parody Rabbit of Seville, and the "Hunter Trilogy" of "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" shorts (Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!) with Fudd himself, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck.
He nearly always misplaced r and l with w (a trait that also characterized Tweety Bird) when he would talk in his slightly raspy voice. That characterization seemed to fit his somewhat timid and childlike persona. Naturally, the writers often gave him lines filled with those letters, such as doing Shakespeare's Romeo as "Soft, what wight thwough yonduh window bweaks!" or Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as "Kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit, kiww the wabbit...!" or "The Beautifuw Bwue Danube, by Johann Stwauss".
Part of the joke is that Elmer is presumably incapable of pronouncing his own first name correctly.
Elmer's easily mimicked voice lends itself to endless takeoffs. In recent times, Robin Williams has parodied Elmer doing Bruce Springsteen's song "Fire": "I'm dwivin' in my cah / I tuwn on the wadio ... 'Cause when we ki-i-i-iss / FIWE!" or as Marlon Brando's character in A Streetcar Named Desire saying "Stewwa!" During a stand-up performance, Gilbert Gottfried once performed a parody with Elmer in a scene from Apocalypse Now: "Da howaww...da howaaww."
Google allows you to change the active language to Elmer Fudd in the options. [1]
Occasionally Elmer would properly pronounce an r or l sound, depending on whether or not it was vital for the audience to understand what the word was. (For example, in 1944's The Old Gray Hare, he clearly pronounces the r in the word "picture")