Woody Woodpecker (2018 TV series)

Plot

The setting is an affectionately generic present-day America, with Woody's tree, the lake, the beach, and Wally Walrus's house serving as recurring arenas. A typical short opens on Wally settling into a quiet afternoon or Buzz setting a trap, and ends five minutes later with the house wrecked, the scheme inverted, and Woody cackling over the wreckage. There is no season-long story, because nothing about Woody ever carries over: each episode is a self-contained five-minute battle of escalating pranks, and every one ends badly for everyone but Woody.

Season 1, the ten shorts announced in November 2018 and released through December, reassembles the whole Walter Lantz roster: Woody (Eric Bauza), his girlfriend Winnie Woodpecker (Tara Strong), the hulking con man Buzz Buzzard (Kevin Michael Richardson), the long-suffering Wally Walrus (Tom Kenny), plus Andy Panda (Scott Weil), the penguin Chilly Willy, and the nephews Splinter and Knothead. Two episodes take Woody to Brazil, a first for the character, made as a gift to the Brazilian channel that had made the revival possible.

The shorts pull gags from every era of Woody's history, updated with phones, laptops, and modern annoyances. Woody torments Wally's attempts at a quiet afternoon, out-eats and out-schemes Buzz, and wins by being the only character in any cartoon who is willing to be completely unreasonable. Chilly Willy's shorts keep their own small formula, a silent penguin versus an oblivious human and a fish he should not have.

The standout short of the run is "The Pen Is Flightier Than the Sword," which the BW Media Spotlight review singles out as the moment the revival proves it understands the form. The premise borrows a classic Looney Tunes idea, an artist's drawings coming to life, but gives it a modern twist: the artist works on a tablet with a digital stylus, so whatever he draws appears on screen and can be erased, redrawn, and weaponized. Woody discovers the pen and immediately does what Woody does, drawing himself food, fortune, and an endless supply of trouble while the artist scrambles to undo the damage. The short builds to a twist ending that the BW Media Spotlight review praised as genuinely working, and it showcases what the best of these shorts do: take a premise built for 1940s cel animation, run it through a present-day object, and let the chaos escalate until the last second reverses who is on top.

Later seasons, directed by Mike Milo through Splash Entertainment, continued the same formula at the same pace, adding new variations on the old rivalries and keeping the classic character designs close to their theatrical roots. The final English episodes arrived in December 2022, closing out a run of 30 shorts that had quietly become one of the longest-running revivals of a golden-age cartoon character anywhere online.

Characters

Woody Woodpecker (Eric Bauza) is the impish trickster at the center of every short, a red-crested agent of chaos driven by appetite and mischief, armed with his cackling laugh and zero respect for property, plans, or personal space. Bauza, one of the most prolific voice actors of the modern era, carries the laugh without impersonating it into parody.

Wally Walrus (Tom Kenny) is Woody's favorite victim, a mustachioed, Scandinavian-accented everyman whose home, meals, and patience exist in the series purely to be destroyed.

Buzz Buzzard (Kevin Michael Richardson) is the con artist of the roster, a big, scheming buzzard who tries to swindle Woody out of something and learns, every time, that the woodpecker cannot be out-cheated.

Winnie Woodpecker (Tara Strong) is Woody's female counterpart, matching his energy in shorts built as duets rather than demolition jobs.

Andy Panda (Scott Weil), Chilly Willy, and the nephews Splinter and Knothead round out the Lantz library, each getting shorts that preserve their original formulas, with Chilly Willy's silent penguin-versus-human battles the most untouched by modernization.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The series is itself an adaptation revival, following Walter Lantz's theatrical shorts (1940 to 1972) and three modern television seasons that ended in the early 2000s, and it arrived a year after Universal's live-action/CG Woody Woodpecker movie. A 13-minute companion documentary, "Bird Gone Wild: The Woody Woodpecker Story," launched alongside the first episodes in December 2018, tracing the character's history for new viewers.¹³