Looney Tunes

Foghorn Leghorn is my favorite Looney Tunes character.
Foghorn Leghorn and The Barnyard Dawg are two characters who appear in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for Warner Bros. They were created by Robert McKimson.

Foghorn Leghorn (full name Foghorn J. Leghorn, according to 1950s comics produced by studio staffers) is a large, anthropomorphic adult rooster with a strong Kentucky accent (reminiscent of Colonel Sanders) and a penchant for mischief. He first appeared in 1946 in a Henery Hawk film entitled Walky Talky Hawky. All of the motion picture Foghorn Leghorn cartoons were directed by Robert McKimson, and the rooster vies with the Tasmanian Devil as the most popular character associated with the director.

Looney Tunes
Golden Collection

Many of the gags involved Foghorn and a canine nemesis (formally known as the The Barnyard Dawg within Warner today, though on early model sheets his name is given as George P. Dog) engaging in one-upmanship through a series of pranks. Most common among them was Leghorn's taking up a plank of wood, while ambling along humming "Camptown Races" (the only intelligible words being "Doo-DAH! Doo-DAH!"), coming to the sleeping Dawg with his front half inside his doghouse, picking up his tail and rapidly whacking (almost always with eight strokes) his exposed rear end. The dog would give chase, usually with his leash still attached to his collar, until the leash stretched taut and his barking was replaced by an anguished shriek. In rare cases, it's the dog that starts the series of pranks; as such it is somewhat difficult to tell who started the feud. This gag was passed down to the Leghorn's grandson in Feather Bluster, where Foghorn was puzzled as to why the kid was behaving that way and the Dog was all too happy to remind him: "Ain't nothin' wrong with 'im, Foggy, 'cept that he takes after you."

Other recurring themes throughout the cartoons included the attempts of the diminutive Henery Hawk to catch and eat Foghorn, and the rooster's efforts to woo the widowed hen Miss Prissy (often by babysitting her bookish son, Egghead Jr).

Foghorn's voice was created by Mel Blanc and was later performed by Joe Alaskey, Bill Farmer, Greg Burson, Jeff Glen Bennett and Frank Gorshin. It was patterned after a hard-of-hearing West Coast-only radio character from the 1930s, known simply as The Sheriff. A toddler version of Foghorn made an appearance in Baby Looney Tunes.

A leghorn is a breed of chicken, and foghorn describes the character's loud, overbearing voice. At its most raucous, it sounds similar to that of Blanc's Yosemite Sam.
Foghorn made a cameo appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in the final scene at Marvin Acme's factory. The rooster appeared in two Chuck Jones shorts of the 1990s, Surerior Duck (1996) and Pullet Surprise (1997), voiced on both occasions by Frank Gorshin. He was also part of the TuneSquad team in Space Jam, and was a croupier at Yosemite Sam's casino in Looney Tunes: Back in Action In addition, Foghorn also appeared in commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Oscar Meyer. Foghorn appeared in a sixth season Family Guy episode, "Back to the Woods," where he was decapitated after walking into a KFC.

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