October 29 is National Cat Day. Ironically though it is two days before Halloween, it is somehow not National BLACK Cat Day, that's August 17, so a black cat related post will follow at that time.
The African Wild Cat was domesticated in the region of the Fertile Crescent by around 7500 B.C. Handy as mousers, playful, and small enough not to be dangerous, their relationship with man dates to the Agricultural Revolution. A factoid relevant to today's other post. By contrast, dogs, our hunting partners, were tamed at least twice that long ago, some think even four times that long (30k y.a.). So cats are just a wee bit wilder. Thus there were not a lot of performing housecats in vaudeville (Our trunk content area). To date we've posted on just Techow's Cats and Swayne's Rats and Cats, and there weren't many more than that. They are simply not compliant enough to willingly do lots of impressive tricks.
So as we have done with respect to some other creatures, we celebrate several of our favorite cartoon cat characters. These are just some ones I like, so please don't suggest ones I "missed", as that would constitute candidates for YOUR list. We restrict ourselves to nine: the fabled number of feline lives.
Krazy Kat (debuted 1913)
Best comic strip evah, li'l dahlin'! More on George Herriman's masterpiece here. And as a bonus, we can throw in Mehitabel.
Felix the Cat (dates to about 1919)
More on Pat Sullivan's creation here.
Tom Cat (of Tom and Jerry, premiered 1940)
More on MGM's most successful cartoon franchise here.
Sylvester (1945)
Warner Brothers' famous cat character, voiced by Mel Blanc, usually tussled with Tweety, a seemingly sweet but disingenuous and sadistic canary, although sometimes he went after the "Mexican" mouse Speedy Gonzalez or larger creatures like the kangaroo Hippety Hop or the dog Spike.
Katnip (of Herman and Katnip, starting 1950)
I haven't really blogged about this series of cartoon shorts before, though it's probably my third favorite after Krazy Kat and Felix. Produced by Famous Studios (Paramount), the series actually began around 1944 with just Herman, the mouse character voiced by Arnold Stang and Allen Swift. Katnip, an exceedingly dumb and trickable cat voiced by Sid Raymond followed six years later.
Courageous Cat (circa 1960)
I wrote about this obscurity here.
Top Cat (1961-62)
As The Flintstones is to The Honeymooners, so is Top Cat to The Phil Silvers Show, with Arnold Stang voicing the scheming title character as Silvers, and a regular from the sitcom Maurice Gosfield (Doberman) as Benny the Ball. Marvin Kaplan, soon to be reunited memorably with Stang in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, did the voice of Choo-Choo. A Hanna-Barbera production, of course.
Gay Purr-ee (1962)
More on this neglected animated feature here.
The Aristocats (1970)
Walt Disney's hit feature had the voices of Phil Harris, Eva Gabor, Hermione Baddeley, Sterling Holloway, Scatman Crothers, et al
No comments:
Post a Comment