Fifi Le Fume

Fifi Le Fume (also called Fifi La Fume) is a fictional character from the Warner Bros. animated television series Tiny Toon Adventures. She is one of the main characters on the show. Fifi is voiced by Katherine Soucie. Fifi is a young, purple and white female skunk with a pink bowed ribbon in her hair. She attends Acme Looniversity and lives in Acme Acres.

Character Profile and Personality
Fifi is a teenaged female parody of the Looney Tunes character Pepé Le Pew, who occasionally, though not often, serves as her mentor in the series. She may also be based on Miss Mam'selle Hepzibah, another French female skunk from the comic strip Pogo. Her fur is purple and white, as opposed to a normal skunk's black and white, and she keeps a ribbon tied to her hair which causes it to fall over one eye, giving her a sultry, coquettish look. She has a massive tail, nearly twice the size of her own body, which is the source of her powerful odor. She uses her tail for a number of things, including a pillow, a pom-pom, and a snare to capture potential boyfriends before they can get away.

Like Pepé, Fifi is French and very flirtatious. She mainly speaks English with a few French words. She also shares the same faults as her idol: intense skunk-odor, and an inability to take "no" for an answer when pursuing the romantic object of her choice. When she falls in love, she loses all self control, and will not allow anything to stop her from literally capturing her prey.

Fifi's putrid stench has been shown to be powerful enough to melt solid steel and the more she falls in love, the stronger her stench gets. However, unlike Pepe, who reeks all the time, Fifi's musk only comes into play when she is attracted to someone, or when it would advance the plot, thus allowing her to interact with other characters when she is not the central focus of the story. Fifi's character is also taken in a somewhat sympathetic light, for she, alone, longs for a lover, leaving many people to feel sorry for her. Also, while Pepe seems oblivious of himself smelling bad, Fifi realizes she has a foul odor and often uses it to her advantage during desperate situations. For instance, in "Out of Odor", she wielded her tail like a machine gun to fire clouds of musk. It is also shown that her smell can be erased by tomato juice, but the effects are only temporary and can be reversed quickly by washing the tomato juice off.

Fifi is somewhat depicted as a bimbo. Being so, she can easily be tricked into anything. For instance, in "Out of Odor," she fell for Elmyra's trap, who was pretending to be Pepe. Simultaneously, Fifi is also referred to as being something of a feminist, and believes that there's nothing a boy could do that she couldn't do herself. However, her remarks toward boys are usually very affectionate and amusing. For instance, in "Aroma Amore", Fifi affectionately remarked, "Leettle boys are such children!"

Fifi is also far more versatile than her Looney Tunes counterpart, appearing in stories that do not entirely revolve around her lust for companionship. Apart from being a lover, her many misadventures include the Prom, looking for mature boys, having to deal with Elmyra, and attempting to get an autograph from a famous movie star skunk hunk.

Best Friends & Family
Like the other characters in the series, Fifi attends Acme Looniversity to be properly educated in the techniques of being a successful cartoon character. Fifi's best friends in the series were fellow classmates, Babs Bunny and Shirley the Loon. The majority of Fifi's appearances were as a part of this group, and they proceeded to engage in numerous adventures.

Together, they were the cheerleaders for the Acme Looniversity Football Team, and at one point, the unofficial back-up players. Another time, in search of more mature men, the three went to a high-class dance only to find that all the boys there were stuck-up. However, most of their time together was spent just hanging out and doing girl stuff.

Like Buster Bunny, Fifi's family is occasionally spoken of but never seen. After capturing Furrball (whom she'd mistaken for a cute boy-skunk), she had planned to introduce him to her family. Despite having a family, she lives alone in a beat-up, red Cadillac in the Acme Acres Junkyard.

Furrball and Calamity Coyote
Fifi once mistook Furrball for a boy skunk in "Aroma Amore", and made the same mistake with Calamity Coyote in "Love Stinks". The results were predictable enough, with Fifi amorously pursuing the terrified boys across Acme Acres with reckless abandon (not unlike Pepe when pursuing Penelope Pussycat), determined to make them her boyfriends. After being repeatedly captured, cuddled, and kissed by the bigger and stronger skunkette, both luckless boys managed to escape a smelly fate in the same fashion: by removing their own white stripes and finding someone else (someone they did not like) for Fifi to chase (Furrball also did it because he felt bad for Fifi and thought having a new prospective boyfriend to chase would cheer her up).

Johnny Pew
In the direct-to-video Tiny Toons movie How I Spent My Vacation, Fifi finds brief joy with a genuine skunk; this one being a movie-star named Johnny Pew. After waiting on him hand-and-foot in exchange for an autograph, Fifi discovers him to be an arrogant jerk when he gives her autograph away to a voluptuous female skunk named Bimbette. Fifi promptly and literally kicks him to the curb while at a movie theater where Johnny was capturerd by Elmyra and was forced to be her pet "kitty" (a fate that Fifi herself knows all too well!).

Johnny Pew was voiced by Rob Paulsen.

Buster Bunny
Fifi has also been known to have brief flings with other boys in Acme Acres.

In the first segment of the episode "Return to the Acme Acres Zone", titled "Real Kids Don't Eat Broccoli", Fifi meets Buster (playing an old-fashioned private eye) at a club and insists that they dance. After forcing Buster to engage her in a lengthy tango, Fifi plants a big kiss on him. "Fifi", however, was revealed to be an evil robot clone by the episode's end.

Dizzy Devil
In the second segment of the episode "New Class Day", titled "Sound-Off", all the Tiny Toons characters are thrown into a silent film. Dizzy Devil chases Buster and Babs into a hollow tree (or thinks he does), but when he reaches in he pulls out a swooning Fifi by her tail. Fifi sighs "What a man!" and promptly chases Dizzy down the street. Dizzy attempts to escape the love-struck Fifi on a bicycle, but after a considerable amount of pedaling discovers it to be a stationary piece of exercise equipment that she had set-up to trap him.

Hamton J. Pig
However, Fifi seemed to have sparked an official relationship with Hamton J. Pig, one of mutual interest. It was also shown that Hamton is more than willing to ignore her stink for her attention, which he often succeeds in doing. Fifi may also perhaps not give off her musk around Hamton as no clouds of stench appear visible whenever she embraces him. Hamton is also the only one of her love interests able to endure Fifi's strong embrace (possibly because he's perhaps the only one of her boyfriends whose never tried to struggle out of it) as he wouldn't seem to find it scarier than torture, and seems to, at best, even slightly enjoy it (albeit because of the attention he gets in return).

In "Prom-ise Her Anything", Hamton asked Fifi to be his date to the Prom, and Fifi enthusiastically accepted in a heartbeat. A successful exercise in "opposites attract", Fifi and Hamton were seen together on many more occasions through the run of the show.

Elmyra Duff
Like most characters on the show, Fifi's encounters with Elmyra usually involve the latter trying to make the former a pet. Fifi is one of Elmyra's "pets" in "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow"; after Elmyra catches Buster, he leads Fifi and Elmyra's other captives on a daring escape. When Buster is recaptured, Fifi and the others work with Babs to rescue him and teach Elmyra a lesson.

Fifi and all her friends were once pursued by Elmyra Duff in the episode "The Horror of Slumber Party Mountain". Elmyra had disguised herself as a gruesome monster and was picking-off the Tiny Toons cast one-by-one to make them her pets. They all eventually freed themselves by the end of the episode.

Elmyra attempted (successfully) to make Fifi her pet in "Out of Odor", when Elmyra mistook her for a cat (she assumed "skunk" meant "stinky kitty"). She disguised herself as Pepe Le Pew, went to her Cadillac, and Fifi fell for the ruse, after which Elmyra squished tomatoes all over Fifi, which nullified her scent. Fifi regained her odor after washing off all the tomato juice, but Elmyra's nose became clogged due to a rose allergy, allowing her to capture Fifi. How Fifi escaped is unknown.

Bimbette
Fifi briefly encountered a vuluptuous pink skunk named Bimbette for the affections of Johnny Pew in How I Spent My Vacation. In the end, Fifi lost Johnny's attention to Bimbette. However, Fifi discovered it to be no total loss; Johnny was arrogant and insensitive.

Bimbette was also voiced by Katherine Soucie.

Trivia

 * In the first segment of the episode "New Class Day", titled "Just-Us League of Supertoons", Fifi was a member of the mighty superhero team, the Just-Us League of Supertoons. She was the team's sultry sorceress, Scentanna, the Mystical Maiden of Musk. An obvious parody of the DC Comics all-star superhero team, the Justice League of America, Fifi's character of Scentanna was an homage to the JLA's classic magic-wielding sorceress, Zatanna. The episode was written by Paul Dini with help from Bruce Timm, the two driving forces behind the DC animated universe.
 * Fifi's seldomly-used ending tagline was, "Au revoir mon petite potato du couch!" ("Goodbye my little couch potato!") as she flirtatiously waved her tail at the audience. This ending tagline was only used three times, for the episodes "Viewer Mail Day", "No Toon is an Island", and "Music Day".
 * Almost every episode of Tiny Toon Adventures (and its followers) also contained fake text gags within the credits which one could only catch with the pause button. The text gag for the episode "Love Disconnection" read "Don't Tell Anyone - Fifi Is Secretly Engaged To Paul Dini". Paul Dini was one of the show's head writers, and the rumor of Fifi being engaged to him was obviously incorrect.
 * Fifi made a brief cameo in the Animaniacs episode "Survey Ladies". In that episode, she is seen running a perfume shop and tries to help Yakko,Wakko, and Dot find the right cologne for Dr. Scratchansniff. The end credits for that episode mistakenly spell her surname as "LaFlume".
 * Early production artwork illustrated by Dan Hackett shows Fifi as a standard black and white skunk, as opposed to the purple and white version seen in the final product. Her design also featured a few other variations in build and design.