Cat's Meow (1957) User Reviews

One of two unusual "cheater" cartoons to re-use Tex Avery shorts long after he'd left MGM

[llltdesq · 7/10 · 7 January 2007]

This is an unusual cartoon, in that it's an example of a "cheater" (a cartoon which incorporates animation from earlier cartoons, in order to save time and money while still meeting the required running time and schedule for animated shorts) taken to the extreme. Because I want to discuss the short a bit, this is a spoiler warning:

This short is, in essence, a cartoon directed by Tex Avery in 1950, one called The Ventriloquist Cat. What they did was take the original animation, re-use it against new backgrounds, changed the cat from black to orange and shoot it in a widescreen format. Given that a large chunk of the work was already done, they probably did this because the studio wanted to make use of the widescreen process on their animated shorts as well and this was an easy way to get experience at making such cartoons, while keeping on schedule and at or under budget. If you've seen Ventriloquist Cat, you've seen Cat's Meow, at least for all practical purposes.

They did this same thing to another Avery short, taking a Droopy short entitled From Wags To Riches, making very few modifications and releasing it in widescreen as Millionaire Droopy.

If you really like Tex Avery (I do) then this is worth seeing.

Cinemascope Re-Make of Tex Avery's 1950 Ventriloquist Cat

[63x927is58401 · 9/10 · 2 May 2006]

Cat's Meow was slightly re-designed of Tex Avery's original Ventriloquist Cat (1950) cartoon.

The only differences among 1950's Ventriloquist Cat and 1957's Cat's Meow are the cat & film design.

Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera both directed & produced the Cat's Meow cartoon. The cat in Ventriloquist Cat, its fur is black. The cat, in Cat's Meow, its fur is orange. The only other difference is Cat's Meow was filmed in cinema scope.

The cat in Cat's Meow looks a lot like Mr. Jinks, the orange cat in the cartooned TV series, Pixie & Dixie, except Mr Jinks wore an ascot tie and the orange cat of Cat's Meow had no tie.

The lines, in both cartoons, are exactly the same.

Scene for Scene Remake

[Michael_Elliott · 23 July 2010]

Cat's Meow (1957)

** (out of 4)

Avery remakes his 1950 cartoon VENTRILOQUIST CAT and doesn't succeed with it. This is pretty much a scene-for-scene remake that doesn't contain any real differences to the action or story. The only difference is that the cat is orange here and the dog is white. I guess the added bonus is that the film was shot in Cinemascope so we get a wider image but if you compare any of the images here, none of them are as full and contain as much as the original film. I watched this film minutes after the original and found it very hard to get through. It's the perfect example that you can film something twice and it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to come up with the same product. All of the jokes that worked in the original film are here and shot the exact same way yet they don't get any laughs this time out. I was a little surprised at how little was actually changed. Even the scene where the dog rips the clothes off the cop is the same but so are the color of boxers as well as the tattoo that the cop has. Couldn't they have at least changed something like that?