Tag: top cat

Comics in Context #235: The Chief and the King

#235 (Vol. 2 #7): THE CHIEF AND THE KING

When I was a child I enjoyed all sorts of animated cartoon series I saw on television, perhaps more or less equally. But as an adult, watching these cartoons again, I discovered that some, notably Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes grew in my estimation, while others, notably the Hanna-Barbera television cartoons of the late 50s through the 1960s, dropped considerably. I still find the early Hanna-Barbera characters–Yogi Bear, et al.–appealing, thanks to their visual design, primarily by the late animator Ed Benedict, and especially the great voice acting by Daws Butler and his colleagues. But while I can name numerous Warners cartoons whose direction and writing make them great and classic–What’s Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening, and on and on–are there individual Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons from the 50s and 60s that are anywhere near that league?

That’s why I was surprised watching the Hanna-Barbera Hokey Wolf cartoons I wrote about a few weeks ago. Usually nowadays when I catch a Hanna-Barbera cartoon of that vintage on Boomerang, I’m disappointed by what now seems to me the weak stories and dialogue. The Hokey Wolf cartoons proved to be surprisingly inventive, leading me to wonder if there is some other Hanna-Barbera series of that period that deserves critical reevaluation. (Someday I’ll get around to writing about The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Hanna-Barbera’s combined parody of silent movie serials and Disney’s Snow White, for example.)

This brings me back to a long-promised topic, Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, which debuted on ABC back in 1961, and starred the voice of character actor Arnold Stang, who had earlier voiced Herman, the tough little New Yorker mouse in the Herman and Katnip cartoons of the 1950s. (Watch animation writer Earl Kress interview Stang about Top Cat here:

Following the success of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones in prime time, Top Cat was also made for evening viewing and aimed at an adult audience that included adults. It lasted only one season, for a total of thirty episodes (TV seasons were longer back then), but has been rerun ever since, first on Saturday mornings and nowadays on the cable network Boomerang.

Top Cat and Herman were part of the Baby Boomers’ childhoods, and today their cartoons can be found on DVD collections and online. They are further proof of my Eternal Present theory of cartoon art in the 21st century: so much classic material is now easily accessible that the significant work of the past has once more part of the present, for those who care to look.

As I mentioned in a previous installment, both Hokey Wolf and Top Cat were inspired by Phil Silvers’ performance as comedic con man supreme Sgt. Bilko on the classic 1950s television series You’ll Never Get Rich a. k. a. The Phil Silvers Show a. k. a. Sgt. Bilko. The dead giveaway that Top Cat was inspired by Bilko was the casting of Maurice Gosfield, who played Private Doberman on Bilko, as a similar character on Top Cat, Benny the Ball.

It’s also been observed that Top Cat, a. k. a. T.C., with his gang of alley dwellers is reminiscent of the team of young actors who started out on film as the Dead End Kids and were later known by various names, most famously as the Bowery Boys. Although Top Cat and his gang are all adults, they are all considerably shorter than their friendly nemesis, Officer Dibble, who comes across as a surrogate father figure trying to keep a bunch of mischievous kids in line. (It strikes me that Dibble, Top Cat and gang are like fun house mirror reflections of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, another cartoon variant on the street gang idea.)

Beyond this, I think that the names of some of Top Cat’s gang–Benny the ball, Fancy Fancy–signal that yet another source for the series was the work of Damon Runyon, who is today best known as the author of the stories that were adapted into the musical Guys and Dolls, about likable small-time gamblers and crooks in New York City. It’s notable that Top Cat is the only classic early Hanna-Barbera series that is explicitly located in a real place: New York City. Hoyt Curtin’s score for the series even at moments evokes the music of George Gershwin.

Apparently Top Cat, which was originally shown in prime time, was meant to be written with more adult sophistication than Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw. But as a child I watched Top Cat avidly, and the series did have a long afterlife on Saturday morning TV. It’s not written above the heads of smart kids.

Producer-director Joseph Barbera repeatedly said that he believed the reason why Top Cat, unlike The Flintstones, lasted only one season in prime time was the adult prime time audience would not accept talking animals in a cartoon series. This seems right. A generation later, The Simpsons, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, proved that a prime time animated series could be a tremendous success, and significantly, it excludes talking animals.

But The Simpsons is also sharp and satirical enough to amuse sophisticated adults. But it seems to me that, despite its origin as a series supposedly for adults, Top Cat really is a kids’ show. Unlike The Simpsons, Top Cat doesn’t delve into politics or social satire or adult relationships like marriage, and certainly not sex. Looking at Yogi Bear cartoons on Boomerang, it now seems obvious to me that Yogi is like a clever and mischievous but goodhearted boy trying to get away with his pranks, notably stealing picnic baskets, under the nose of Ranger Smith, a stand-in for a father as authority figure. Top Cat is wilier and acts more mature than Yogi, and Officer Dibble more gullible than the often formidable Ranger Smith, but essentially T. C. and his gang are still like kids trying to outwit their father figure. So the appeal this show would have for kids is clear.

What surprises me in re-watching Top Cat episodes now are subtexts that I ignored as a child because this was indeed a show about “funny animals.” In discussing Hokey Wolf and Fantastic Mr. Fox weeks ago, I pointed out that both had protagonists who are anthropomorphic talking animals, essentially humans disguised as animals. But what if you think of them–or of Top Cat–as actual humans? It seems to me that if Hanna and Barbera had done Top Cat as a series about a gang of humans, not cats, it would have had to be radically different or it wouldn’t have worked. Watching episodes of Top Cat recently, I was struck by how grim the premise of the series would be if Top Cat and his friends humans and not funny talking alley cats. (I will be discussing specific episodes, so I issue spoiler alerts.)

Top Cat not only lives in an alley but in a trash can (years before Oscar the Grouch did the same). He uses Officer Dibble’s police phone, presumably because he can’t afford one of his own. He has no job or source of income apart from his various schemes. Early in one episode, “Rafeefleas,” Top Cat collects what money the gang has. T. C. himself has none, the other five have only a little over sixty cents among them. In short, beneath their comic banter, they are desperately poor. If Top Cat were human, nowadays we’d call him one of the homeless.

But I don’t recall the term “homeless” being commonly used back then: the homeless poor were still referred to as tramps and hobos and bums. Moreover, the hobo was then often a comedic figure rather than a sad one, perhaps following the tradition of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. When Top Cat was first on television, for example, one of comedian Red Skelton’s signature characters was Freddy the Freeloader, a charming clown-like tramp who seemed happy and satisfied with his life. Similarly, although they would love to make a fortune, Top Cat and company do not seem unhappy about their lifestyles.

But imagine if Top Cat and his gang had been depicted as humans rather than cats. Wouldn’t it seem pathetic rather than amusing to have them living in an alley and even in trash cans? If Top Cat and company were truly homeless humans, they would surely be dressed in rags. As cats, following the conventions of cartoons, they instead wear minimal clothing which somehow proves suitable in most places they go. Sgt. Bilko aimed for and lost fortunes, but he had the safety net of his low but secure income as an army sergeant. In contrast, Top Cat and company have absolutely nothing. If he were human, Top Cat’s sunny confidence in his own talents, despite the squalor of his surroundings, would make him seem to be deep in denial of reality. In another episode, “A Visit from Mother,” Benny is distraught because he has told his mother he is not only successful but has become mayor of New York, but now she is coming to visit him and he fears she will learn the truth. For a moment the viewers may stop to consider just how far from successful Top Cat and company are. (And again, a story about a son playing pretend, in effect, to please his mother seems more like a subject for a children’s show.)

I wonder if Top Cat reflects memories of the Great Depression, which its creators had lived through, transformed into a comedy about a heroic conniver whose wit, self-confidence and persistence enables him to rise above, and indeed, ignore the poverty around him. As in the show’s celebrated opening credit sequence, with the title character pretending to ride in a limousine and dining at a fancy restaurant (by stealing a sewer worker’s lunch), Top Cat acts as if he is rich and successful. Penniless he may be, but as the title song goes, he is nonetheless the chief and the king of his world, its top cat.

Like Sgt. Bilko, Top Cat and his accomplices manage to scale the heights before returning to their status quo as alley dwellers. In “A Visit from Mother”, Top Cat succeeds in convincing Benny’s mother, aided by her naivete and nearsightedness, that her son is indeed mayor, and even succeeds in faking a ticker tape parade:

In “˜The Maharajah of Pookajee”, Top Cat ends up impersonating the wealthy maharajah and getting to stay in a palatial hotel suite–until the real maharajah inevitably turns up, of course:

In “The $1,000,00 Derby”, Top Cat not only comes close to winning a million dollars but manages to fool not only the news media but even the city and federal government into thinking he is “the richest man in the world,” oil-rich sheik Ali Khat:

Now there is a premise with the potential for a real satire on the media and politics, but the episode really only scratches the surface. That’s typical of Top Cat: hinting at greater satiric implications without delving into them. Even back then, Jay Ward’s Bullwinkle and Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil would have gone further! If only someone would someday revive Top Cat and explore its potential!

My favorite episode, in my childhood and now, is “All That Jazz”, which had that title before either the Kander and Ebb song from Chicago and Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film. The title is the full name of another trickster cat, A. T. Jazz, who is voiced by Daws Butler, possibly performing the voice he would have given Top Cat. (I recalled Butler using his Hokey Wolf voice for Jazz, but that’s not quite right: he gives Jazz a somewhat different voice, much like Hokey’s but also with traces of another Hanna-Barbera character, the hipster cat Mr. Jinks.) Having come all the way from Syracuse (a reference to another city in New York State I hadn’t noticed as a child), Jazz sets about to supplant T. C. as head of his gang, ladies’ man, master con artist, and, in short, “the top cat” of the area. (According to this episode, “top cat” is a title, suggesting that T. C. has an unrevealed real name.) Thus begins a war of the tricksters:

I think one factor that keeps Top Cat from being a truly adult series is that Top Cat’s cunning schemes are so often so transparently obvious to adult viewers. That is true in “All That Jazz.” For example, T. C. tricks Jazz into thinking diamonds have been discovered in a distant country, but he invents a name for the locale that Jazz is easily able to discover is phony. Retaliating, Jazz fakes a radio broadcast declaring that the diamond discovery is real, but watching as an adult, I found it hard to believe that Top Cat didn’t recognize Jazz’s undisguised voice.

In researching tricksters, I learned that one aspect of this character archetype is that he often ends up being tricked himself. That’s one of the pleasures of “All That Jazz,” as Jazz and Top Cat take turns manipulating the other and then proving gullible to his rival’s tricks. In the last act of the story, Jazz and Top Cat each even succeeds in tricking himself. A Hollywood producer and his lackey arrive, looking for a new discovery to cast in their movie The Thing from the Alley. On separate occasions they invite Top Cat and Jazz to be their new star. But Top Cat thinks this is one of Jazz’s tricks, and Jazz thinks this is one of Top Cat’s tricks, with the result that each turns down this offer of potential fame and fortune. This is a recurring pattern on Top Cat. When T. C. masquerades as the Maharajah of Pookajee, he hands out “rubies” that are really cheap costume jewelry. Not once but twice in the episode, Top Cat is offered real rubies, but he assumes they are more costumed jewelry, outsmarting himself. Jazz outsmarted himself in another way as well: having successfully gotten Top Cat’s gang to switch their loyalties to him, he then thoughtlessly proceeded to alienate them, one by one, while investigating T. C.’s diamond scam.

At the end of “All That Jazz” the childlike, trusting Benny the Ball accepts the producer’s offer, and Top Cat and Jazz both realize that the producer was just what he claimed to be. Now Top Cat finally triumphs over his rival by proving to have quicker trickster reflexes. On learning of Benny’s deal, Top Cat immediately tells the producer he is Benny’s agent, and recruits the rest of the gang as Benny’s entourage. Top Cat and company then drive off in the producer’s limousine, literally leaving Jazz in the dust of the alley, which Dibble demands he clean up.

Even as a child I recognized and enjoyed the fact that the rivals were played by two stars of cartoon voice acting. Both in my boyhood and now, my principal pleasure in watching the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the late 1950s and 1960s–the pre-Scooby-Doo era, if you will–is not so much watching as listening to them. Chuck Jones famously called TV cartoon shows of this period “illustrated radio,” because of their severely limited animation. The phrase is apt in another respect, too: like classic radio comedies, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of this period remain showcases for wonderful cartoon voice acting.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

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March 4, 2010
Comics in Context #233: Cunning Canines

#233 (Vol. 2 #5): CUNNING CANINES

One of the animated films nominated for an Academy Award this year is live action director Wes Anderson’s venture into stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book, which draws upon the traditional characterization of the fox as a trickster, which goes back to Aesop’s fables and the European tales of Reynard the Fox. Other wild members of the dog family likewise have appeared as tricksters, notably the coyote in Native American mythology, and sometimes the wolf.

Thinking about Hanna-Barbera’s 1960s animated trickster Top Cat for a forthcoming installment of this column led me to consider another example of the canine trickster: Top Cat’s predecessor at Hanna-Barbera, Hokey Wolf. Baby Boomers may find this chilling, but 2010 marks Hokey Wolf’s 50th anniversary. Yogi Bear (another trickster) had originally appeared in cartoons in The Huckleberry Hound Show; when Yogi got his own show, Hokey Wolf was created to take over his spot on Huckleberry Hound, from 1960 into 1962.

Hanna-Barbera’s TV cartoons and characters often seemed to be inspired (to be kind about it) by other characters, actors or series. But in Hanna-Barbera’s better work, they reworked the concept in such a way as to make it uniquely theirs. Hence, for example, The Flintstones is essentially Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners transplanted to a Stone Age suburbia.

I think that even as a child I recognized that Top Cat was inspired by the TV series that was originally called You’ll Never Get Rich but was retitled The Phil Silvers Show, and familiarly known as Sgt. Bilko. When I first saw Top Cat, Phil SIlvers was still a prominent figure on television, and Bilko was in syndication. Bilko was Silvers’ signature role: a fast-talking sergeant in a motor pool on an army base who endlessly devised money-making schemes. Aided by his crew of corporals and privates, Bilko continually bamboozled authority figure Colonel Hall and numerous other dupes, and his plans often became elaborately successful before usually collapsing due to some twist of fate. (After all, the title was You’ll Never Get Rich.) Bilko was a classic example in pop culture of the comedic con man; W. C. Fields and Groucho Marx played variations on this sort of character in most of their films. Probably a major reason for Bilko’s success was his role as an army sergeant in a time when most of the adult men watching TV were veterans of either World War II or the Korean War: Bilko was their hero, defying the frustrations and limitations of military life they well remembered.

Beyond that, Bilko was a mid-20th century version of an archetypal figure in comedy, the trickster. Top Cat is so appealing and memorable a character because he is such a well realized version of this perennial comic figure. (I have previously written extensively about tricksters in my “Comics in Context” columns about Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, his novel on the subject.)

Hanna and Barbera had already introduced a Bilko-like character, Hokey Wolf, on The Huckleberry Hound played by Daws Butler in a voice that did not duplicate the sound of Phil Silvers’ voice, but caught his rapid-fire delivery, his self-confidence, and his outward friendliness while moving in for the kill with his sales pitch. Indeed, animation historian Mark Evanier notes that Hanna and Barbera initially intended Butler to play Top Cat, presumably using the Hokey Wolf voice.

Whether legally or not, the Internet has proved to be a vast library of the history of animated cartoons, and enabled me to watch some Hokey Wolf cartoons for the first time since my childhood. I was impressed by Hokey at his best, concocting schemes that reflect the adult world more than I had expected in cartoons that were aimed primarily at small children. (As usual, I issue spoiler warnings.) For example, in Tricks and Treats the hungry Hokey pretends to have his foot injured in a steel trap set by a mild-mannered farmer.

Hokey has his hero-worshiping sidekick Ding-a-Ling (voiced by Doug Young) take photographs, and threatens to use them as evidence when he sues the farmer. Taken aback, the farmer agrees to let Hokey recuperate in a bed in his house, if Hokey will drop the lawsuit. So, as Hokey had planned, he and Ding-a-Ling get to freeload at the farm. Eventually the farmer discovers that Hokey is faking and gets out his shotgun, but Hokey had the foresight to devise a backup plan. Representatives of the Humane Society show up, taking more photographs, to praise the farmer for taking such good care of the injured wolf.

But seeing these cartoons again as an adult, I was struck by the darker implications of the cartoons that I had completely missed as a child. These are comedies dealing with “funny animals.” But in this cartoon Hokey is really pretending to be a cripple. Do children stop and think of how much the “teeth” of that trap on his foot could hurt? And when the angered farmer gets out his shotgun, isn’t he intent on killing Hokey? There is a grimness here underlying the comedy.

Consider the ambiguous status of “funny animal” characters in animated cartoon series. At one end of the spectrum are characters like Disney’s Pluto, who are meant to be more or less real animals, lacking human-level intelligence or the ability to speak. On the other hand, Pluto’s owner, Mickey Mouse, not only can talk and think like a human being, but is accepted in society as if he were human: he owns a house, he holds jobs, and so forth. And then there are characters who are somewhere between these poles. For example, Yogi Bear is “smarter than the average bear”: he has a human intellect and can talk. Yet Ranger Smith treats him as an animal who is supposed to obey the rules set down by humans in Jellystone Park, or else he’ll get shipped to captivity in the St. Louis Zoo.

Many of these characters are essentially humans in animal form. The tension between the “human” and “animal” sides of the characters is often essential to the cartoons. Since Bugs Bunny is an animal, Elmer Fudd has license to shoot him when it’s “wabbit season,” yet since Bugs is essentially human, it would seem like murder if Elmer succeeded in killing him. (Indeed, typically when Elmer is tricked into thinking he has killed Bugs, he is overcome with guilt.) And so we in the audience root for Bugs to outwit Elmer.

In the cartoon Who’s Zoo Hokey Wolf and Ding-a-Ling declare themselves to be “hungry” and looking for food.

Though outwardly animals, they act like humans, talking, wearing clothes, walking on their hind legs. Hokey may be jauntily dressed in straw hat and bow tie, but he and Ding-a-Ling have no visible means of support. If they were humans, they would be tramps. Though Daws Butler endows Hokey with a lighthearted manner, when Hokey admits to being hungry in this cartoon, Butler makes him sound serious indeed.

Hokey and Ding-a-Ling arrive at a city zoo and realize that the “dumb animals” living there are well fed (“We should be so dumb,” notes Hokey, in a somewhat bitter tone). So most of the cartoon consists of Hokey trying unsuccessfully to get a huge steak away from a captive lion. Finally, Hokey shifts strategy: since he and Ding-a-Ling are wolves, they simply take up residence in the wolves’ cage at the zoo. The cartoon ends with Hokey rattling a cup against the bars of the cage, as he explains to Ding-a-Ling that in “prison movies” doing this always gets the guards to bring the inmates food. It’s a rather ironic end to the cartoon. Sure, we may be used to thinking of wolves kept captive at the zoo. But Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are also like people in animal guises, and they have chosen to sacrifice their freedom and become prisoners behind bars in exchange for being fed.

I was taken aback by another Hokey Wolf cartoon, Hokey Dokey, in which Hokey encounters the Three Little Pigs.

Like Frank Tashlin’s The Fox and the Grapes (1941), this is another cartoon exercise in metafiction. In Hokey Dokey Hokey knows the story of the Three Little Pigs and decides to create his own sequel to the tale; at the cartoon’s end, Hokey even consults a book to reread the original fable.

This is hardly the only animated cartoon that deals in revisionist versions of well known fairy tales. At this time Jay Ward had already been doing Fractured Fairy Tales and Aesop and Son on the Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show for years. Moreover, there was already a long history if cartoons that not only parodied the classic Three Little Pigs story but also Disney’s landmark Three Little Pigs cartoon (1933). In Hokey Dokey the bricklaying pig wears virtually the same outfit as his Disney counterpart. Among the previous cartoons that created variations on Disney’s Three Little Pigs were Tex Avery’s Blitz Wolf (1942) and Three Little Pups (1953) for MGM and Friz Freleng’s Pigs in a Polka (1943) and the jazz-scored Three Little Bops (1957) for Warners.

Presumably because they are protagonists of cartoons for kids, Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are not predators. Early in Hokey Dokey, Hokey declares that his goal is not to eat the pigs but to con them into giving him the brick house, since he and Ding-a-Ling need a place to live in the winter months.

Hokey’s strategy is startling for what is purportedly a kiddie cartoon. He poses as an insurance company agent, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the Big Bad Wolf, and making it clear to the pigs that he suspects foul play. The three pigs deny everything, but are clearly shaken. In the traditional end of the Three Little Pigs’ story, the Big Bad Wolf slides down the chimney into a cauldron of boiling water and perishes. Disney let the Wolf escape, but it is clear in Hokey Dokey that the pigs believe that they killed the Big Bad Wolf. Now Hokey is treating them as murder suspects. Interestingly, Hokey refers to this as a “double indemnity” case, suggesting that the cartoon’s writer (Michael Maltese, perhaps?) was thinking of Double Indemnity–James M. Cain’s 1935 novella and Billy Wilder’s 1944 film.

After intimidating the Three Pigs by playing insurance investigator, Hokey dons a sheet and impersonates the ghost of the Big Bad Wolf. This is a rather macabre stunt, and it works. Guilt-ridden and frightened of retribution, the Three Pigs pack up and leave, telling Hokey that he can have the brick house if he wants it.

In the end, like Disney, Hanna and Barbera can’t kill off the Big Bad Wolf: he turns up, alive and reformed, and turns the tables on Hokey.

So here is an early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon that works on two levels, for children and for any adults who might be watching. Apart from the Three Little Pigs dealing with their guilt over seemingly committing with murder, there is also Hokey and Ding-a-Ling’s motive for trying to trick the Three Little Pigs out of their house. Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are homeless. For an instant even a child watching this cartoon might visualize Hokey and Ding-a-Ling shivering in the snow if they cannot somehow find shelter. Hokey may be amusing, but the motives for his actions in these two cartoons–hunger and homelessness–are not funny at all.

Fifty years after Hokey Wolf’s debut, writer/director Wes Anderson went much further in applying an adult perspective to the trope of the talking trickster animal in his recent stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox.

This is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book of the same name, which treats its talking animals in a relatively conventional manner: the animals have human intelligence and can talk among themselves (although humans apparently don’t understand their language), but they still roughly follow the lives of animals.

Anderson’s movie, however, seems very much a reinterpretation of Dahl’s material for an adult audience. In the film, the animals not only talk but wear full sets of clothing. The lead character, Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, works as a newspaper columnist. The character Badger, voiced by Bill Murray, is a lawyer. Anderson himself voices a weasel who works as a real estate agent. (Supply your own joke here.) It becomes apparent that the animals comprise a community that parallels human society. In Dahl’s book Mr. Fox steals chickens from the local human farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, because that is what foxes do. In Anderson’s film Mr. Fox reverts to stealing chickens as a result of what New York Times critic A. O. Scott aptly terms “something of a vulpine midlife crisis.”

As in Dahl’s book, the human farmers retaliate by trying to hunt down, starve and exterminate the foxes and the other animals. But if the animals are just like humans, then the farmers are effectively attempting to commit murder. One could easily interpret the clash between the hunters and the animals as a metaphor for class warfare, with the rich attempting to eliminate the poor–or, actually, the middle class, since Anderson’s animals have respectable bourgeois professions. Perhaps one could even interpret the farmers’ war on the animals as a metaphor for racism, with the farmers attempting to commit genocide by wiping out those beings whom they consider to be their inferiors. (Watching the film, it struck me that the chickens are not presented as having human intelligence; if they did, then arguably the foxes who eat them would be guilty of genocide as well!)

Although it is intended for an audience of children, Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox in effect justifies theft: the readers’ sympathies will clearly be with Mr. Fox and his friends and family, not with the farmers who are out to destroy them. Dahl portrays the farmers as particularly nasty, so they seem to deserve to have the foxes steal chickens from them. But moreover Dahl seems to be saying that the foxes are justified in stealing from the wealthy farmers, who have far more than they need. Hence, Mr. Fox is something of a Robin Hood figure, especially when he provides stolen food for the community of animals.

In Anderson’s version, Mr. Fox reverts to stealing chickens apparently as away of recapturing his youth, when he did that all the time. This may serve as Anderson’s metaphor for youth’s rebellion against the system, and the film seems to argue that middle-aged members of the middle class are likewise justified in rebelling against a system controlled by the rich and repressive. Beneath the trappings of a children’s fable, complete with talking animals, Anderson has disguised a rather radical point of view.

Casting George Clooney as the voice of Mr. Fox works well in this interpretation of Dahl’s story for adults. Following the example of Phil Silvers, Daws Butler’s Hokey Wolf deals in the fast talking hard sell. Arnold Stang’s Top Cat isn’t as hyperactive, but he, like Hokey, overpowers his target with a barrage of verbiage. Clooney has a smooth way of speaking that also proves suitable for trickster characters, as the Coen brothers recognized in their film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Clooney’s more laid-back screen persona suits a more mature version of the trickster, one that is also capable of emotional vulnerability, which is what Anderson’s Mr. Fox becomes. Moreover, Clooney conveys the calm and cool that separates the trickster from many of his hot-tempered, violent opponents, like the farmers in this film.

I will have much more to say about classic tricksters in cartoon art in near future installments of “Comics in Context,” including Top Cat and one of the greatest characters of this sort in comics, Popeye’s pal J. Wellington Wimpy.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

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February 18, 2010
Comics in Context #231: Killing Katnip

#231 (Vol. 2 #3): KILLING KATNIP

During my lengthy leave of absence from writing “Comics in Context,” the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City and the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco jointly held a traveling exhibition on the art of Harvey Comics, many of whose most celebrated characters, such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, originated in animated cartoons produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios. I’m not that interested in Casper or Richie Rich, but the exhibit did reawaken my interest in some of the less famous animated stars of the Famous cartoons.

Towards the end of 2009, character actor Arnold Stang passed away, and I decided to write columns about two of the most memorable characters he voiced in animated cartoons. The first, starting in 1944, was Famous Studios’ Herman the mouse, who was eventually teamed with perennial antagonist Katnip the cat, voiced by the late Sid Raymond, for a series of theatrical cartoons that ran till 1959. (Owned by the Paramount studio, Famous was later reorganized and renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios.)

Only two years later, in 1961, Stang starred as Top Cat in the Hanna-Barbera animated television series of the same name. Following the success of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones in prime time, Top Cat was also made for evening viewing and aimed at an adult audience that included adults. It lasted only one season, for a total of thirty episodes (TV seasons were longer back then), but has been rerun ever since, first on Saturday mornings and nowadays on the cable network Boomerang. Similarly, Paramount sold Herman and Katnip and the other characters Famous originated, and their animated shorts, to Harvey Comics, which put its logo on the cartoons when they turned up on television.

So Top Cat and Herman were part of the Baby Boomers’ childhoods, and today their cartoons can be found on DVD collections and online. They are further proof of my Eternal Present theory of cartoon art in the 21st century: so much classic material is now easily accessible that the significant work of the past has once more part of the present, for those who care to look.

In one of his blog entries following Stang’s passing, cartoon/comics historian Mark Evanier notes that Stang was producer/director Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s third choice to play Top Cat, and comments that “Arnold Stang was an odd choice, as he was usually associated with milquetoast, whiny characters and Top Cat was a cool, confident fellow”. Short, scrawny, and bespectacled, Arnold Stang onscreen indeed usually played what would now be called nerds. Maybe today his best known role onscreen is as one of the two hapless gas station attendants who are literally thrown about by Jonathan Winters as he demolishes their station in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). (Marvin Kaplan, the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat, played the other attendant.)

Surely in casting Top Cat Hanna and Barbera were aware that Stang had long been voicing a similar character, Herman. In various onscreen “milquetoast” roles, Stang used a high-pitched voice. But as Herman and Top Cat, Stang spoke at a lower pitch. Ironically, as a cartoon mouse or cat, he could project the personality of a tough guy: self-confidence, keen intelligence, a formidable will, and sheer cool. Herman and Top Cat sound basically alike, although Top Cat’s voice tends to be smoother and warmer.

I observe that sources disagree as to whether the first Herman and Katnip cartoon was Naughty but Mice (1947), which establishes the series formula by pitting Herman against a cat:

Or Mice Meeting You (1950):

The earlier cartoon establishes the series formula by pitting Herman against a cat, but this black cat doesn’t quite look like the familiar Katnip of the 1950s, with his red fur. (All of the cartoons with Herman that I mention in this week’s column are credited to Seymour Kneitel as director.)

The Herman and Katnip series appears to be Famous’s response to Hanna and Barbera’s highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM. The major difference between these two cat-and-mouse series is that Tom and Jerry (usually) don’t talk, whereas Herman and Katnip do. Stang gives Herman an old-style New York City accent. I noticed among the comments on a Herman and Katnip cartoon posted on YouTube that one person pointed out that Herman pronounces “furnace” as “foinace,” and asked, “Who talks like this any more?” But that was a stereotypical Brooklynese accent in the mid-20th century, familiar in so many movies and television shows of the period.

Maybe Famous was attempting to have Herman mimic Bugs Bunny: Mel Blanc, who originated Bugs’s voice, claimed it was a combination of Brooklyn and Bronx accents. So Bugs Bunny is a wisecracking, feisty, sharp-witted New Yorker, transplanted by director Tex Avery in the first true Bugs Bunny cartoon, A Wild Hare (1940), into the woods. Only occasionally do the Warners cartoons make it explicit that Bugs is a New Yorker, as in Friz Freleng’s A Hare Grows in Manhattan (1947), which recounts his growing upon the Lower East Side. Herman has an even stronger New York accent. Famous Studios originated as the legendary Max Fleischer animation studios, which Paramount took over. Apart from a relatively brief sojourn in Florida, the Fleischer and Famous Studios were based in New York City, so it makes sense that Famous would develop a character who was clearly a New Yorker.

In Naughty but Mice Herman is explicitly referred to as a “cousin” from the “city” who is visiting mice living on a farm in the country. Maybe this is an allusion to Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse who visit each other’s homes, which had served as the basis for Walt Disney’s Oscar-winning “Silly Symphony” cartoon The Country Cousin (1936) in which the title character visits his relation in the city. Herman proceeds to save his country cousins from the proto-Katnip cat who persecutes them by outwitting him. In another cartoon I saw on YouTube, Mice Capades (1952), which pits Herman against a fully evolved Katnip, Herman is again presented as a visitor who liberates mice from their oppressor, Katnip. In the series Herman is even drawn as something of a leading man mouse, handsomer than the goofier-looking mice in the supporting cast.

So it seems to me that Herman is Famous Studios’ salute to New Yorkers. Whereas other filmmakers, like, say, Frank Capra, might extol the virtues of the country man against the cynicism and corruption of the city, Herman embodies the smartness and persistence of the native New Yorker.

I had long assumed that “Itchy and Scratchy,” the cartoon-series-within-a-cartoon-series in The Simpsons, with its over the top violence, was intended as a parody of Tom and Jerry. After all, the Tom and Jerry cartoons are also known for their violence. I recall reading Warner Bros. cartoon director Chuck Jones saying that when Wile E. Coyote’s Roadrunner-catching schemes backfired on him, and he fell off a cliff or was caught in an explosion, he suffered more humiliation than pain. That is a principle that generally seems to apply to the Warners cartoons. When Elmer Fudd shoots Daffy Duck in the face, his beak might spin around, but Daffy seems more disgruntled than hurt. There’s something abstract about the violence in the Warners cartoons. In contrast, Hanna and Barbera often stage the violence in their Tom and Jerry cartoons to emphasize the pain Tom feels, and to thereby give the audience some sense of what that pain must be like.

But I recently read that the true inspiration for “Itchy and Scratchy” is the Herman and Katnip series, and that, as Katnip would say, seems logical. Longtime Simpsons producer David Silverman says, “People say it’s like an insane Tom and Jerry, but it’s really more of an insane Herman and Katnip. Herman and Katnip is hilarious because it’s just bad. It’s painfully bad.” Oh, I disagree that they’re bad cartoons, but painful, yes. These cartoons push the envelope on violence still further, with results that can be downright macabre. (And as usual, I issue a spoiler warning for those who do not want to know the details of these cartoons.)

When Herman arrives in Naughty but Mice, he learns that several of the country mice–presumably his relatives–are dead, and “the new cat” is a “killer.” Now, obviously, in many funny animal animated cartoons, one animal is attempting to catch, kill and devour the other, but normally the predator never succeeds, and so death remains an abstraction in these cartoons. It is therefore startling to see these clearly distraught country mice in Naughty but Mice talk about actual killings, and how the surviving mice are “starving” because the cat keeps them from finding food Of course, in the context of animated cartoons in which animals have human intelligence and can talk, the death of a mouse can be as shocking as the death of a human being.

So Herman takes action against the cat, including giving him whiffs from a bottle of “quick-acting catnip” marked “100 proof.” Is this how Katnip got his name? The cat immediately gets high, moving around in a daze, following Herman, who holds a rose doused with catnip. “Love in Bloom” is played on the sound track, and the pupils in the cat’s eyes turn to hearts. I suppose that many viewers might have interpreted the cat’s behavior as a kind of drunkenness. But I wonder if, by using catnip as a substitute, Famous Studios thus managed to get drug humor past the censors. Is there even an implication that Herman has turned the cat gay, as he wanders after the mouse and his rose, seemingly in love?

The seduction is followed by destruction. The cat falls down a well, Herman grows in a huge stick of dynamite, and startlingly, actually kills the cat: Chopin’s Funeral March even turns up briefly on the sound track. Since the cat was established as a killer, this does balance the dramatic scales, but it still seems shocking in the context of a cartoon directed at children. It would be worse if the cat had ceased to be, but, following another convention in cartoons of that period, nine ghosts rise from his body, one for each of the cat’s traditional nine lives. This trope is most amusingly presented in director Friz Freleng and writer Michael Maltese’s Back Alley Oproar (1948) in which when singing cat Sylvester dies, his nine ghosts rise towards heaven singing the sextet from the opera Lucia di Lammermorr. But Naughty but Mice closes with the nine angry ghosts of the murdered cat pursuing Herman, who waves the catnip-doused rose at them without effect. He seemingly has no way to fight them off. That is a downright weird and very dark ending.

In Mice Meeting You Katnip has acquired his familiar red-furred visual design, but not yet his name: in the cartoon proper (as opposed to the logo later added by Harvey) he is called Kitty. This is an example of what I call counter-Christmas viewing: though the mice sing happily over Christmas dinner at the end, the overall tone of this holiday cartoon, with its war between Herman and Katnip, hardly seems Christmas-like. Once again Herman is introduced as a visitor, though this time the other mice live in a big, impressive expensive-looking house rather than a barn. Usually in cat and mouse cartoons, the cat is guardian of the house, keeping the mice from stealing food. This cartoon, though, reverses the situation: the mice are presented as if they are the rightful residents of the house, and the cat is an invading outsider who gains entrance by pretending to be Santa Claus. (Herman later impersonates Santa as well in this short.) As usual Herman heroically does battle with the cat on behalf of the other mice.

At one point during their war, Herman points to mistletoe, and Katnip puckers up for a kiss. Is the not-too-bright Katnip simply responding to the mistletoe tradition without stopping to realize that (A) he hates Herman and (B) Herman is male? Bugs Bunny famously and repeatedly masqueraded in drag to allure and trick Elmer Fudd, but the premise of those gags seemed to be that Elmer was attracted to women. But Herman doesn’t pretend to be female and still gets a sexual response from Katnip. So, again, is Katnip gay? In any case, Katnip gets “kissed” by the suction cup of a plumber’s helper that Herman thrusts at his face.

At the finale the defeated Katnip has been reduced to immobility. Ornaments have been hung on his body, and Herman plugs Katnip’s tail into an electric socket, causing them to light up. Katnip, though presumably he’s been electrocuted, still does not move. Is Katnip dead? I suppose at least symbolically he is: he’s been turned from a cat into a Christmas tree.

In Mice Capades Herman tricks Katnip into thinking that a bottle of vinegar he drank is actually poison. Katnip is persuaded that he has died, lies in a coffin-like box, and Herman, dressed as an angel, and the other mice, stage an elaborate charade to convince Katnip that he has awakened in heaven. But then Herman, as the angel, decrees that Katnip has been condemned to go to the “other place,” represented by that aforementioned “foinace.” Terrified, Katnip promises to reform and no longer chase mice. But then Katnip discovers that the bottle labeled poison was actually vinegar, sees through the trickery, and goes after Herman with a shotgun. Herman manages to bend the gun barrels so that Katnip shoots himself–dead! Katnip’s ghost (only one this time) rises from his body, bent on revenge. But Herman warns him about hell again, Katnip panics, and the cartoon closes, rather eerily if one thinks about it, with Katnip’s ghost acting as a servant waiting on Herman and the other mice. Of course Katnip will be back alive in his next cartoon, but this ending still seems a little disturbing.

Katnip is neither killed nor immobilized in Mouseum (1956), but its ending is both macabre and in dubious taste:

In a museum, Herman hides in a mounted elephant’s head. Katnip sticks his gun barrels up the elephant’s trunk; Herman (who seems unusually strong) bends the barrels, and when Katnip fires, the elephant’s glass eyes shoot out from its head. Seeing the glass eyes on the floor, Katnip leaps to the illogical conclusion that these are his own eyes, picks them up, and screws them into his own eye sockets, with the result that Katnip really can’t see, and he runs out of the museum, continually smashing into things, thinking he’s gone blind.

So the Herman and Katnip cartoons are much edgier than I recalled from my childhood. It is often said that theatrical cartoons from the 1930s through the 1950s were shown with feature films, and hence were intended for audiences of all ages. I suspect that adults at that time often considered the cartoons on the bill as something specifically for the children in the audience. But, as with much of the material in the Classic Children’s Comics collection I’ve been writing about, it looks as if Hollywood animated cartoons at the time traveled under the adults’ radar. The Herman and Katnip cartoons get away with having the protagonist murder the antagonist and go unpunished, drug humor and hints of homosexuality. None of that would be allowed in live action movies aimed at adults at the time. But because Herman and Katnip are funny animals in kiddie cartoons, they get away with it. The Max Fleischer studio may have been turned into Paramount’s Famous Studio, with its outwardly blander output, but perhaps the characteristic Fleischer subversiveness survived and kept cropping up in Famous cartoons like these.

In one of my upcoming columns, I will turn to Mr. Stang’s other celebrated character, Top Cat, and return to a longtime theme in “Comics in Context,” the tradition of the trickster.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

February 5, 2010