Which Looney Tunes character is a red, furry monster with tennis shoes? The answer is Gossamer.
Gossamer is a large, shaggy orange-red monster whose most recognizable visual feature is his enormous pair of tennis shoes. He has a heart-shaped face, two oval eyes, a wide mouth, and long arms ending in clawed fingers. His wild hair makes him look much more threatening than the delicate meaning of his name suggests.
Chuck Jones introduced the unnamed monster in Hair-Raising Hare, released in 1946. In that short, he serves as the henchman of a mad scientist and attempts to capture Bugs Bunny. In the 1952 cartoon Water, Water Every Hare, he is called “Rudolph” or simply “Monster.” The name Gossamer was first used in Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24½th Century in 1980.
The name is deliberately ironic: “gossamer” refers to something fine, fragile, or cobweb-like, while the character is huge, hairy, and destructive. He is sometimes confused with the Tasmanian Devil, but Taz is a spinning, brown carnivorous marsupial rather than a red-furred monster in tennis shoes.