With all great screen couples -- Powell and Loy, Astaire and Rogers, Bogie and Bacall, Felix and Oscar -- the romantic chemistry is real. "[S]crewball comedy was a wider category than the term itself suggests," writes critic/historian James Harvey. "It names a style less associated with scattiness or derangement than with a paradoxical kind of liberation, with romantic exaltation of a very down-to-earth kind." And that's why I'd like to add one of the great (imaginary) screen couples: Pepé Le Pew and Sylvester J. Pussycat. I see their story as one of a romantic passion that erupts from out of nowhere and can't be contained; it really is about liberation, and that's what movies are for, to take us someplace outside of ourselves. To free us from what we already know. And after The Looney Tunes Show (2011 - 2014), the Bible of Baffy, anything's fair game.

But why Sylvester, invariably part of "Tweety and" (despite appearing in his own solo films until 1947)? Tweety debuted in 1942, but by the mid-'fifties the grinning, grotesque, homicidal pixie of the Robert Clampett years was gone, replaced by a terminally cute, gender-ambiguous wiseguy. There was a clear division of labor: Tweety got the wisecracks, Sylvester got the pratfalls. It worked.

Look at Virgil Ross's model sheet for Sylvester, introduced in 1945 (a proto-Sylvester from 1939 looks nothing like him): he's 50% housecat, 50% circus clown, and one can't dominate the other. He looks and talks like a buffoon, but moves with feline grace, and it's a catlike leap from there to Sylvester's most obvious influence, Charlie Chaplin. (Sylvester's legs are shorter than the rest of his body, a nod to the Little Tramp's baggy-pants appearance.)

Then there's his emotional range: think of THE SCARLET PUMPERNICKLE, a swashbuckling Errol Flynn takeoff with Sylvester playing a Basil Rathbone villain; THE LAST HUNGRY CAT, with a guilt-ridden Sylvester on the verge of suicide, and his tormented "birdaholic" in BIRDS ANONYMOUS. That's one versatile pussycat!

You remember that in Pepé's 1945 debut, he had amorous designs on a male cat? Well, this would bring him full circle. I love the idea of a romantic comedy in which he and Sylvester realize they're meant for each other, not to mention that this would be the simplest and most effective way of "uncanceling" Pepé -- reinvent him as a gay icon. The cartoon poster boy for #MeToo loses his heart to a rude, slovenly (but emotionally vulnerable) male cat trapped in a sadomasochistic relationship with a canary (and isn't Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc's Professor Pericles really Tweety gone over to the dark side?). It's how we wished life worked, and that's reason enough to celebrate Pevester.