“Touching, is it not?”
This may not be the first Pepe cartoon but it is Penelope’s, and it won an Oscar. (the only Looney Tune that won an Oscar and was not directed by Friz Freleng) We see a man going to open his perfume shop for the day. Only to find Le Pew in there already. The shop owner is a coward and won’t even try to get him out. So he has to go whine to some guard like character, but even he wants nothing to do with it. So the shop owner throws in a cat that is purring by his legs. (What a dick.)
Upon being launched in, a bottle of white dye gets poured on her back, and cartoon history is born. The skunk mistakes her for one of his species and a chase ensures. One gag is that she is locked in a glass room and they both pantomime talking. (The only time I recall her ever communicating) In the end, they both fall out a window and land in different substances. Pepe in paint that apparently masks his scent, because now Penelope is chasing him! We iris out on Pepe wondering if he is too attractive.
Personal Rating: 4
I don’t know how deep your knowledge of behind-the-scenes facts about WB cartoons is, but you forgot to mention that Eddie Selzer, the producer who came after Leon Schlesinger, hated Chuck Jones’ Pepe Le Pew cartoons (Selzer also hated bullfighting, which led Chuck Jones to create “Bully for Bugs” and thought Sylvester should be paired with a woodpecker instead of Tweety, which almost led to Friz Freleng quitting in disgust), yet accepted the Oscar when “For Scent-imental Reasons” won. I’m amazed Chuck and Michael Maltese (the writer for ten [or nine and a half, since Maltese shared credit with Tedd Pierce on 1947’s “Scent-imental Over You”] of the 17 Pepe cartoons made during the Golden Age of Animation. Tedd Pierce did “Odor-Able Kitty” [the first one] and half of “Scent-imental Over You”, Lloyd Turner did “Odor of the Day” [the one done by Arthur Davis that had Pepe as a more-or-less normal skunk who fights with a dog over cabin space], Warren Foster did “Dog Pounded” [which, to me, is just a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon with Pepe in a cameo appearance], Chuck Jones himself wrote for three Pepe cartoons [Two Scents Worth, Heaven Scent, and A Scent of the Matterhorn], and John Dunn did the last one, Louvre Come Back to Me) didn’t jump Selzer in the parking lot after the award ceremony and take the Oscar that they earned.
I did know that Selzer did that two-faced B(Fighter)S. As for not mentioning it, chalk that up to me being an idiot teenager at the time of that writing who didn’t know what he was doing.