To tell the truth, I always preferred the scrappier, edgier Warner Brothers animated characters to Disney’s, who seemed kind of sanitized and boring to me.
Mickey Mouse? Donald Duck? Goofy? Meh. Give me Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzales, Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and especially that voracious vortex of chaos personified, the Tasmanian Devil!
“One Warner Bros. star who was very popular on screen in a handful of cartoon misadventures was that whirling dervish, the Tasmanian Devil, who buzzsawed his way through everything in his path,” noted the Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons.
“Robert McKimson originated the character, and Mel Blanc supplied the voice. Blanc, who described his characterization as ‘growl slobbering, indecipherable gibberish,’ supposedly told McKimson while voicing the first cartoon, ‘I defy you or anybody else to tell me he doesn’t sound like a Tasmanian Devil.’”
“He is best known for eating anything in his path and having speech consisting mostly of grunts, growls, and rasps (in his earlier appearances, he does speak English with primitive grammar) as well as his ability to spin like a vortex and bite through nearly anything,” Wikipedia reports. “While in motion, this character is often depicted as a spinning tornado, drilling himself through trees or soil. He has been portrayed as being calmed by music, though not the bagpipes.”
Originally appearing in five cartoons from 1954 to 1964, the monstrous marsupial got his own Gold Key comic book in 1963. “Taz” became even more popular in subsequent decades.
In an American Comic Book Chronicles entry on 1963, John Wells noted that busy Gold Key “…awarded comics series to Hanna-Barbera’s The Jetsons, Cave Kids (set in the Flintstones’ ‘universe’ but featuring characters original to comics), and Mr. and Mrs. J. Evil Scientist (recurring characters from several Hanna-Barbera series, promoted to an annual of their own that anticipated The Addams Family and The Munsters by a year) as well as returning Peanuts (in reprints of the Dell series) and Tweety and Sylvester (also initially reprints) — each dropped during the 1962 Dell transition — to their line-up.
“Several other animated characters were tested in one shots, notably Augie Doggie, Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, Pebbles Flintstone, Pixie and Dixie, and Mister Jinks and Tasmanian Devil and His Tasty Friends.”
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