I meant to re-post this a while back from Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Brew site, because I think it’s so damn cool. Did you know Itchy and Scratchy were not that inspired by Tom and Jerry, but rather a less memorable and more bizarrely violent cartoon called Herman and Katnip? Yep, it’s true. Here’s what Jerry, who hosts the Worst Cartoons DVD with awesome insights just like this one, has to say:
By the 1950s, the writers at Paramount’s Famous Studios were suffering from cartoon fatigue — endlessly rewriting and redrawing the same tired stories for Popeye, Casper, Baby Huey et al. for years on end. The Herman and Katnip pictures were pure cat-chasing-mice opuses, which were by now running on auto-pilot, and got progressively more and more violent as the years went by…
Embedded below is the last 90 seconds from Mouseum (1956) which features my all-time favorite bad-taste ending. I love it. It makes me laugh because of how wrong it is. By this time, the animators had really lost all perspective.
Check out the whole post at Cartoon Brew, and pick up the D-V-D here! It’s like BlueRay, but with fewer letters!
Who leaves a LOADED GUN on display in a museum? Were they striving for authenticity or something? And why would a dinosaur skeleton have a sign next to it that reads “EXTINCT?” As if they’re reassuring people that that particular dinosaur is not, in fact, in existence.
Comment by Friginator — May 11, 2009 @ 4:50 pm
My one real question is: was that Bugs Bunny standing with the group at the “H” title card at the end?
Comment by Alison — May 15, 2009 @ 11:27 am