Tweetie Pie

Tweetie Pie
Merrie Melodies series
Tweetie Pie's Blue Ribbon reissue title card
Directed by	Friz Freleng
Produced by	Eddie Selzer
Story by	Michael Maltese Tedd Pierce
Voices by	Mel Blanc (All Other) Bea Benaderet (Woman-uncredited)
Music by	Carl Stalling
Animation by	Ken Champin Virgil Ross Gerry Chiniquy Manuel Perez
Layouts by	Hawley Pratt
Backgrounds by	Terry Lind
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s)	May 3, 1947 (Original) June 25, 1955 (Blue Ribbon Re-Issue)
Color process	Technicolor
Language	English

Tweetie Pie is a 1947 Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng and produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, depicting the first pairing of Tweety and Sylvester. Tweetie Pie won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, breaking Tom and Jerry's streak of four consecutive wins on the category. Sylvester doesn't talk in this short, the other Tweety shorts where he's mute are Bad Ol' Putty Tat, Putty Tat Trouble and Tree Cornered Tweety. Although the original titles are not available on any DVD, historians have found black and white copies of the original titles.

Allegedly, when Tweety's creator, director Bob Clampett, left the Warner Bros. studio in 1946, he was working on a fourth film starring Tweety, whom he would pair with Friz Freleng’s Sylvester, who previously appeared with Porky Pig in his (Clampett's) cartoon Kitty Kornered (released in 1946). This is probably not true as Clampett's unit was taken over by Art Davis, rather than Freleng. Freleng adopted the Tweety project and merged it with a project he was working on—a follow-up to his second Sylvester cartoon, Peck Up Your Troubles, featuring Sylvester in pursuit of a witty woodpecker.

When Freleng decided to replace the woodpecker with Tweety, producer Eddie Selzer objected, and Freleng threatened to quit. Selzer allowed Tweety to be used, and the resulting film went on to win WB's first Oscar, which Selzer accepted. After Selzer's death, the Oscar was passed on to Freleng. The cartoon would also go on to become a phenomenal success, and Tweety would always be paired with Sylvester from that point on as a result, because the duo carried a high amount of star power (in the meantime, Sylvester continued to appear in a fair amount of cartoons without Tweety).