Foxy

Animator Rudolf Ising created Foxy as the star of the new Merrie Melodies series he was directing for producer Leon Schlesinger (Ising had already helped his partner Hugh Harman create another series, entitled Looney Tunes). Foxy's first appearance on screen was in the 1931 cartoon "Lady, Play Your Mandolin!", a standard musical comedy of the era, here set in a Western saloon (this was also the first Merrie Melodies short). The character and his nameless girlfriend would appear in two more cartoons that same year directed by Ising: "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!", a musical set on a trolley and usually considered one of the better Ising Merrie Melodies, and "One More Time", a musical cops-n-robbers short.

Foxy was the most unabashedly unoriginal of the various Mickey Mouse duplicates so prevalent in the 1930s, a fact that didn't escape the notice of Walt Disney. Ising retired the character after only three cartoons, possibly at Disney's request. Foxy's departure didn't spark much originality, however, as Ising simply replaced him with another Mickey stand-in named Piggy.

Nevertheless, Foxy was not gone forever. In a 1992 episode of the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures, Foxy and his girlfriend (here christened "Roxy") appear along with fellow forgotten Warner Bros. progenitor, Goopy Geer. The three live in a world of black-and-white which is visited by the series' stars, Babs and Buster Bunny. Series animators significantly redesigned the foxes for this episode, making them more like the stars of the later series Animaniacs than their Mickey and Minnie incarnations from the 1930s.

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