Heaven Scent (1956) User Reviews

Pepe's MO makes scents

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 15 July 2008]

OK, so maybe every Pepe Le Pew cartoon has pretty much the same plot: female cat gets her back painted white, Pepe comes along and takes her for a belle femme skunk, and the attempted romance begins. For that matter, pretty much every cartoon starring each of the directors' own characters (Pepe Le Pew and Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote for Chuck Jones, Yosemite Sam and Sylvester/Tweety for Friz Freleng, Foghorn Leghorn and Tasmanian Devil for Robert McKimson; Freleng and McKimson alternated between the Speedy Gonzales cartoons). But still, you gotta admire Pepe's unyielding stamina in his quest for finding true love. Clearly, two of Jones's characters (Pepe and Wile E.) continue aiming for their goals despite the obvious fact that the goals look unattainable. True, Pepe is mostly a composite of every French stereotype - aggressive with relationships and not smelling too pleasant - but I still consider his cartoons, including this one, quite entertaining. C'est l'amour!

PS: I thought that I saw a sign saying "Edouard Selzer", which would have been an in-joke referring to producer Eddie Selzer.

Some of the funniest lines of dialogue in any Pepe Le Pew

[llltdesq · 8/10 · 14 January 2002]

This short is of interest mainly for the dialogue. There aren't many sight gags and the biggest laughs come from Pepe's lines. I have to quote one or two: Did you know that when you are in love, it is almost impossible to get insurance? But then, security isn't everything.

Very funny short. Not the best of the series, which is Touche and Go, at least so far as I'm concerned, but very good and runs fairly often on Cartoon Network. Recommended.

Not heavenly but very good

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 30 January 2013]

I do like Pepe LePew and his cartoons. Admittedly more now than 10 years old where the humour did go over my head. Heaven Scent is not as good as Scent-imental Romeo, For Scent-imental Reasons, Touche and Go and The Cat's Bah, but apart from the too abrupt ending it is very good. The story is not that much different either than what we've seen before, basically the whole series is a sort of one-joke formula. People will either be troubled by that or are used to it by now, I'm leering towards the latter actually but I have seen better from Looney Tunes. On the plus side, and there is much to like in Heaven Scent, the animation is still the colourful and elegant style that we are familiar with(if more in the backgrounds and colours than the secondary character designs), and the music has a very charming romantic lilt that is also very witty. The gags are very amusing, though much of the humour is mostly verbal and Pepe utters some of the sharpest and funniest lines of any of the cartoons with him starring. I always admired how risqué the humour was with the Pepe cartoons, and this is also the case here. Pepe is great value, and voiced superbly as ever by Mel Blanc, who rarely if ever put a foot wrong. All in all, very good if not one of the best. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The usual stuff - not very imaginative but quite amusing

[bob the moo · 3 January 2004]

A cat goes out to try and buy some nice perfume for herself, but finds herself confronted by dog after dog. She flees into a nest but finds herself with a streaked of white paint on her back, attracting the attention of Pepe Le Pew.

Pepe Le Pew cartoons are a strange beast. They are nearly all the same joke based around the same characters and it must be hard to keep them feeling fresh. To show that, this film is rather stale and lacks anything that made it stick out in my mind or made me laugh. The plot is the usual `cat with white paint' routine and it sticks to the formula from then on. That's not to say it isn't amusing - it is if you are happy just to accept the same cartoon replayed, but it is not fresh or sparky.

Pepe is an OK character but very much a one joke one. He has a few good lines here. The cat is the usual ratty looking little puss but yet still manages to have no distinguishable character of her own!

The ending is sudden and very poor but overall the short is passable and quite amusing without being laugh out loud funny. Fans of Pepe will enjoy it but it is no different from any other of his cartoons.

This cartoon features blatant product placement during its first couple of . . .

[pixrox1 · 6/10 · 4 May 2021]

. . . minutes, as a shop features a prominent display of "Selzer Water" for sale. Edward Selzer, scion to a family hydration conglomerate fortune, served as producer for most outings in this cartoon skunk franchise. Seeing his liquid shilled as part of the HEAVEN SCENT story line is akin to watching Hannibal Lecter chowing down on a bucket of chicken at the lip of his fellow gourmet's cellar pit, IF the Colonel had been a financial backer on THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Similarly, if one of the sawyers slurped some noggin seeping just after wielding a title blade in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and proclaimed "It sure don't taste like tomato juice!" because a major V-8 stockholder was footing that film's bill, viewers would be justly outraged. Therefore, HEAVEN SCENT should be consigned to flagrant advertising hell.

HEAVEN SCENT is notable for at least four reasons . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 17 October 2015]

. . . the first being that it is one of the few "Pepe Le Pew" outings in which his female black cat mating target skunk-stripes herself ON PURPOSE, in this case to repel a horde of threatening canines making her life miserable (evidently, BEFORE she's ever encountered a REAL stinker, especially Mr. Le Pew). Most likely, everything this cat knew about skunks she learned on Wikipedia (which lacks a Smell-O-Rama key). The second deviation from standard Pepe fare is that he proposes to MARRY the white-striped cat (which would be constitute bigamy, since an earlier cartoon featured his scolding wife--an actual female skunk!--and neglected kids). This nuptial offer is bracketed by Pepe first humming, then singing a snatch of "And the Band Played On," the theme of Pepe's Warner Bros. producer's live-action feature, STRAWBERRY BLONDE, in which James Cagney plays Pepe as a failed dentist. Next, Pepe calls the cool cat a "hoo," and says to the camera that all she needs is some "occupational therapy, like making love" (that is, "Hoo-Ing") to get into his good graces. Finally, this blatantly Hyper-sexualized "kids' short" concludes with Pepe about to pursue his "hoo" into a blocked off tunnel! His last words to the camera underline the most prominent anatomical difference between males and females, and then he symbolically penetrates the tunnel, preempting director Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST climax by several years.

"She is surprisingly strong."

[utgard14 · 7/10 · 8 October 2015]

Pretty typical Pepé Le Pew short. Certainly not bad but nothing that special. Pepé is once again in love with a black cat that has a white stripe painted down her back. The cat does everything she can to get away from the amorous skunk but he's always one step ahead of her. If you've seen one Pepé cartoon, you know what to expect here. There's the accent, the fourth-wall breaking, the innuendos, the puns, and the little adorable hop that he does. The animation is very nice and colorful. Playful music from Milt Franklyn. Great voice work from Mel Blanc. It's an enjoyable cartoon short but not one of the best from Pepé (or Chuck Jones).

A great cartoon with Pepe Le Pew

[agj8012 · 9/10 · 24 April 2010]

Though it is true that the same plot is used in every Pepe Le Pew cartoon, I could watch ten of them in a row and still be laughing. This is because the writing in these Pepe Le Pew cartoons is among the sharpest in cartoon history. There are a lot of great one-liners in this cartoon, as well as a lot of sexual innuendo. Pretty much the same thing that happens in every other Pepe cartoon puts together the plot in this cartoon. A cat gets a white stripe on its back, and Pepe Le Pew is under the impression that the cat is a female skunk. Pepe chases the cat around a lot, and then the cartoon ends. The ending to the cartoon seems a bit abrupt, but that does not take away from my enjoyment of the cartoon. When I was younger, I did not really care for Pepe Le Pew and often wondered why my parents were always laughing hysterically at them. Now I know. I would not recommend this cartoon nor most other Pepe cartoons to impressionable young children, but for everyone else, this is extremely funny.

A cartoon that doesn't really end

[slymusic · 9 August 2010]

Directed by Chuck Jones, "Heaven Scent" is a good but not hilarious Warner Brothers cartoon starring the voice of Mel Blanc as our favorite French skunk: Pepe Le Pew. The plot of this cartoon is the same as in practically any other Pepe cartoon: boy tries to get girl, girl wants to be a mile away from boy.

Any scenes in this film that make me laugh? There's the sign written in phony French, warning anyone to not touch the flagpole as it contains wet paint. The cat, disguised as a skunk, emits a smug expression and an eye blink after all the dogs run and hide, then a fisherman expresses himself (again in phony French) before escaping from the cat/skunk. Upon Pepe's first appearance, he sings "Strolling through the Park One Day", then as he catches up with his reluctant partner, he continues singing while smooching in rhythm.

"Heaven Scent" is okay, but my major disappointment with it is that the ending leaves a dangling thread that keeps me wanting more. Oh, well. We can't have everything, can we?