Happy 72nd Birthday to Tasmanian Devil (AKA Taz)
Created by the unsung director Robert McKimson in the early-to-mid 1950s, who desired to create an animal character who was not a cat, dog, rabbit or fox, created the eponymous Tasmanian Devil as Bugs Bunny's new adversary. Interestingly, McKimson himself had never seen an actual Tasmania Devil in person, and his crew didn't know what it was either.
First appeared in 1954's Devil May Hare, written by Sid Marcus and McKimson respectively, features Bugs, who has no idea what a Tasmanian Devil is, stumbles into the creature himself. Like many of McKimson's characters, Taz was a cynical grouch of some sort and had a very elastic bent to his design and movement, typical of McKimson's shorts from the late '40s to early '50s, thanks to the likes of Rod Scribner, who's most famous for the rubbery, squash-and-stretch animation of the one-and-only Bob Clampett before McKimson took over his unit and became director. Though, the character was strictly referred to the Tasmanian Devil, where as retroactively he was named Taz.
After the premiere of Devil May Hare, Taz would be absent for sometime as producer of Warner Bros. Cartoon studios at the time, Eddie Selzer who didn't know anything about animation and was described by Chuck Jones to have no sense of humor, wasn't the biggest fan of the character, just like how he didn't think Sylvester and Tweety wouldn't work as a duo or how he didn't believe bull fight weren't funny leading to Jones and Mike Maltese to purposely do Bully For Bugs. However, movie goers responded positively to Taz and even Jack Warner himself wondered what happened to the character
“The executive at the studio, Ed Selzer, said to stop making them, that this character was too obnoxious. So after two of them I stopped. Then one day, Jack Warner called him in and demanded, “What happened to the Tasmanian Devil?” Warner fumed that he’d better tell me to make more because there were boxes and boxes of letters coming in about the character. So, I made about three more after that.” - Robert McKimson
What made Taz different from the likes of Yosemite Sam is how he's somehow more threatening than the diminutive redhead, but is more dimwitted than Elmer Fudd and Sam put together, constantly mumbling incoherent speech's that provided much of the character's dialogue and humor ("What for you bury me in the cold, cold ground?"), as well as the famous spinning sound effect that, while used in previous Warner Bros. cartoons from as early as the 1930s (The Fire Alarm (1936) starring less-known character Ham & Ex, and Beans the Cat), it widely became heavily associated with Taz and one of the many long-lasting sound effect to stay in the Warner Bros. sound library for their Looney Tunes projects, though the sound design for Taz in his first appearance is very different than what we come to recognize.
Taz would appear in a couple more shorts with Bugs Bunny such as Bedevilled Rabbit (1957), Bill of Hare (1962) and Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare (1964) and one with Daffy Duck in a fan favorite Ducking the Devil (1957), which gave birth to the immortal lines "I'm a coward! But I'm a greedy coward!".
Though the character appeared in very few shorts, he would go on to become prominent in many Looney Tunes merchandise, movies and TV (referred to mainly as Taz, presumably to be PC about it) shows such as the mentor of Dizzy Devil on Tiny Toon Adventures (1990 - 1992), starring in his own series Taz-Mania (1991 - 1995) and as a toddler on Baby Looney Tunes (2002 - 2005), and as the pet of Bugs and Daffy in The Looney Tunes Show (2011 - 2013), among other projects.
