Trivia / Speedy Gonzales

• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: In Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin makes two erronous claims about Cat-Tails for Two. One is that Speedy Gonzales is not mentioned by name (he is), and another is that there are multiple rodents in the short, when Speedy is the only mouse who appears.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the early Mexican Spanish and Japanese dubs, Speedy was voiced by women.
• Denial of Digital Distribution: Speedy's cartoons are nowhere to be found on HBO Max, even before all of the post-1951 shorts were removed from the service, due to the fact that Warner Bros. is still afraid of him being an ethnic stereotype in spite of the fact that Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales.
• Executive Meddling: The reason he was paired up with Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes ' Audience-Alienating Era is because of high demand for both Speedy and Daffy cartoons. The studio would rather kill two birds with one stone and put the two together rather than continue their shorts separately due to budget constraints.
• Exiled from Continuity: In The '80s and 90s, various stations, notably ABC and Cartoon Network, would flat-out refuse to air Speedy Gonzales cartoons and exclude Speedy from major Looney Tunes projects due to concerns of him being an Ethnic Scrappy towards Mexicans. When it was revealed that Mexicans see the little mouse as a positive role model, Speedy was brought back as a Looney regular.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Speedy on The Looney Tunes Show is now voiced by Fred Armisen (who is Hispanic, but is actually Venezuelan on his mother's side of the family; his father, is Japanese and German) from Saturday Night Live. In many prior appearances, Bob Bergen served as Mel Blanc's replacement.
  • In Mexico, Speedy's Mexican VA also voiced Tweety, Granny and some other female or kid roles, until she was replaced by male voice actors until this day. His current VA in Mexico is Arturo Mercado and Paco Gazquez in Spain.
  • In Japan, he was first voiced by Nobuo Tobita, later replaced with Roko Takizawa (Mimi-sensei) and later finally replaced with Yūji Mitsuya, who is his current VA to this date.
  • Other actors who have brought to life the hyperactive Mexican rodent after Mel Blanc's death have included Jeff Bergman, Greg Burson, Billy West, Eric Goldberg, Eric Bauza, Dino Andrade, Gabriel Iglesias, and Joe Alaskey.
• Screwed by the Network: Speedy's removal from Cartoon Network was a part of the changing of CN's administration and what they deemed acceptable. A fan campaign through The Termite Terrace Trading Post with backing from several Hispanic outlets managed to make him be Saved by the Fans but it was a long fight. The absolute lowest point being when CN's head of public relations Laurie Goldberg went to the press to claim CN NEVER aired those Speedy cartoons in the first place, which was a straight up lie. ^note In the historic context at the time CN was fending off criticism of betraying its roots with Network Decay by proponents of the first era. As such they were trying hard to squash any complaints as annoying outliers, even if they had to lie to do so.
• Translation Correction: A minor example, but his last name is always spelled as "Gonzalez" in Spanish dubs, because Spanish patronimics always ends with "Z".
• Write What You Know: Robert McKimson based Speedy's initial characterization on a pair of Mexican brothers he played polo with.