Foxy (Merrie Melodies)

Foxy
Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies character
Foxy on the Merrie Melodies title card in 1931
First appearance	Lady, Play Your Mandolin! (Merrie Melodies, August 1931)
Last appearance	Two-Tone Town (Tiny Toon Adventures, September 1992)
Created by	Rudolf "Rudy" Ising
Voiced by	Carman Maxwell or Johnny Murray (possibly) (1931) Rob Paulsen (1992)
Information
Species	Fox
Gender	Male

Foxy is an animated cartoon character featured in three 1931 animated shorts in the Merrie Melodies series distributed by Warner Bros.  He was the creation of animator Rudy Ising, who had worked for Walt Disney in the 1920s.

In 1925, Hugh Harman drew images of mice on a portrait of Walt Disney. Disney and Ub Iwerks would then use it as the basis for their creation of Mickey Mouse, the character who eventually became Disney's most popular. Comics historian Don Markstein, calling Warner Bros. animator Rudolf Ising's subsequent Foxy "perhaps the leading Micky Mouse imitator", observed that,

Never in animation, before or since, has a character looked more like Mickey Mouse. Smooth out the tiny points that supposedly turned his big, round ears into fox ears, shave the bushiness off of his tail, and they were ringers. Do the same to his girlfriend (unnamed at the time), and she looked exactly like Minnie [Mouse]. They also acted like Mickey and Minnie did at the time. Despite this lack of originality, Foxy was the first character to originate at Warner (as opposed to being brought in from outside, like Bosko).

Foxy was the star of the first Merrie Melodies cartoons Ising directed for producer Leon Schlesinger. (Ising had already helped his partner Hugh Harman create another series, titled Looney Tunes, with the character Bosko.) Foxy's first appearance on screen was on August 1931 in "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!". This short set in the Old West features Foxy developing affection for the tavern singer who would become his girlfriend.