Failed Looney Tunes Characters You Forgot About

Publish date: 2023-12-28

The first cartoon these gophers appeared in — 1947's "The Goofy Gophers" – was written by Bob Clampett, the guy who created Tweety Bird. So clearly he had a type: tiny, precocious animals who made life a living nightmare for an animal with the misfortune of being bigger and dumber than they.

While Tweety made short work of Sylvester, the Goofy Gophers squared off against a dog, and then later Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck. They just never clicked with audiences enough to become a big thing on their own, however, appearing in only eight pun-tastically titled shorts from 1947 to 1965, such as "I Gopher You," "Gopher Broke," and "Lumber Jerks." It was only when these cartoons showed up in TV cartoon compilations in the '60s that anyone even thought to give these also-rans actual names: Mac and Tosh. (As in, if you combine them you get "macintosh," not unlike the "chippendale" one gets from combining the names of the very similar-looking Disney rodent duo, Chip n' Dale.) The "Goofy Gophers" was merely shorthand that stuck.

At any rate, they were based on a turn-of-the-century comic strip about two ludicrous Frenchmen called Alphonse and Gaston. Like Mac and Tosh, they were overly polite to one another, quoted literature, and used big words. In short, they didn't quite fit the tried-and-true cartoon fare of one animal smashing the other with a mallet.

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