The reason I love Warner Bros. cartoons above all others -- apart from the writing, direction, acting, and score -- is their attitude toward cats. They like cats. Even when Tweetie is clobbering Sylvester or that obnoxious puppy is scaring the pants off Claude, Warner Bros. animators use actual cat qualities (skittishness, spectacular attack failures, and highly conditional love) to make us care; in other words, they clobber with love.

Unlike Disney, who demonstrably hates cats (and mothers, whatever that's about), Warner Bros. operates from the position that there are reasons to love cats, even if you aren't the type. Like if you're a ferocious bulldog, for instance. In Feed the Kitty, Marc Anthony (Mel Blanc) is one such dog: fierce, snarling, and looking for a fight. At the cartoon's open, Marc Anthony spies a wee kitten in an alley and charges in, teeth bared, with intent to scare the little thing blind. Unfazed by this display, the kitten mews a greeting, crawls up the dog through his open jaws, plucks out a bed on his brawny back, and falls fast asleep.

Marc Anthony is in love.

He is also far from the rough street dog he pretends to be. Still carrying the sleeping kitten on his back, Marc Anthony walks into his suburban home just in time to get a lecture from his frustrated owner (Bea Benaderet), who is standing in the living room in a sea of chewed up dog toys. She forbids him to bring one more thing into the house: Not ONE MORE THING. The rest of the cartoon, therefore, is how one spoiled dog tries to keep his curious kitten a secret from his owner through some of the best cartoon choreography you'll ever see.

After disguising the cat as a windup toy and a powder puff, Marc Anthony is forced to hide it in the flour bin just as his owner is getting ready to bake cookies. Thinking the kitten is in the batter (it's not), a distraught Marc Anthony watches from exile outside as the dough is mixed, rolled, cut, and baked. When he's allowed back in the house, grief-stricken and wracked with guilt, Marc Anthony accepts a cat-shaped cookie from his consoling owner, shaking in ironic misery. It's a genius performance, tear-inducingly funny and unforgettable. So unforgettable in fact, that Pixar paid loving tribute to the scene by recreating it in Monsters, Inc., when Sully feared Boo had been mangled in a trash compacter. A fitting homage well done. 

I am not one of those people who wax hagiographic about Chuck Jones as a director -- I'm more of a Clampett/McKimson girl -- but it's hard to argue with Feed the Kitty as one of the most deftly composed and executed shorts going.

​Written by Michael Maltese, directed by Charles M. Jones (my favorite Jones), Feed the Kitty is seven minutes you'll never forget or regret. Watch it now:

This post is my contribution to the ONE of My All-Time Favorite Cartoons Blogathon, hosted by Movie Movie Blog Blog.

​Everyone should read everything right now.

Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears
Mama Bear, 1944

Little Red Riding Rabbit
​Little Red Riding Hood, 1944

A Hare Grows in Manhattan
Lola Beverly, 1947

Fans of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies know of the famous "Termite Terrace," the workspace for Warner Bros.'s brilliant short subject animators, so named for the dilapidated condition of their original back lot studio. Even after the artists moved to grander quarters, they kept the nickname and the irreverence until members of the group moved on to different studios or television. The output from Termite Terrace -- particularly from 1938 to 1949 -- include some of the best cartoons ever made, in my opinion (which is correct). 

From the beginning, Warner Bros. cartoons were known for caricaturing Hollywood stars, satirizing current events, and making musical and anecdotal references to pop culture. That attention to what consumed the popular imagination continued throughout WWII, mixing in soft lampoons of real-life anxieties, like the draft, rationing, and espionage, with overt (occasionally racist) propaganda.

I picked two wartime beauties for this Blogathon, because I like to imagine myself sitting in the balcony of the Castro Theatre in 1944, waiting to see Arsenic and Old Lace after my shift at one of the Bay Area shipyards in among my friends and neighbors --  a newsreel, the coming attractions, then Bugs Bunny (Mel Blanc) giving some jerk his come-uppance. I imagine it would have felt remarkably comforting.

Bugs Bunny is hanging out at an airbase reading a book that describes how Gremlins (which are an actual mythological Thing, apparently) sabotage airplanes. As he is mocking the idea, a real life gremlin walks by and begins to wreak havoc. Bugs tries to best the creature and is hilariously frustrated until nearly the end.

There's many a great gag in this picture, made all the better by director Bob Clampett, that dark genius, who was also responsible for Russian Rhapsody, another gremlin-themed short starring Hitler (best Hitler EVER) beset by tiny Russian saboteurs.

The angry rabbit is my favorite rabbit.

Bespectacled Bobby Soxer, Red Riding Hood, is taking Bugs Bunny to grandmas (ta HAVE, see?), but the Big Bad Wolf has other plans. Red is grating, grandma is out working the swing shift at Lockheed, and (spoiler) Bugs is not eaten by the wolf.

Soooo many references in this short that I didn't get until much older, especially in the music: "Five O'Clock Whistle," about a factory worker who doesn't know when to quit; "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," a woman's lament that all the good men are away at war [which is (sorta) sung by Bette Davis in Warner's Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)]

The great radio and television actress Bea Benadaret. known best as George & Gracie's neighbor in The Burns and Allen Show, provides the unforgettable voice of Red Riding Hood. I defy you not to incorporate some of the things she says in your regular life after watching this. Billy Bletcher provides the voice of the Big Bad Wolf, which is extra funny, because he was the voice Disney's wolf about a decade earlier in The Three Little Pigs.

This is a weird one, but a good one.

Wouldn't you much rather see a cartoon or two instead of 20 minutes of Coke ads and 12 minutes of previews? 

Me too.

This post is my contribution to the Shorts! Blogathon, hosted by Movies, Silently

Please take a moment to peruse the many excellent entries in yet another fab-themed event.

Okay, Now That's All Folks.

But how cool is that?

It's quite possible that Mel Blanc was my first personal hero. In our household, Warner Bros. cartoons were the main source of information about how movies work, particularly how they work well, through direction (including art and music direction), writing, editing, scene composition, and character development. When I realized that one guy did 90% of the acting, it kind of blew my mind and helped me develop an abiding respect (and an ear) for voice actors thereafter.

Melvin Blank (with a "k") was born in San Francisco to a couple who ran a ladies-wear business, and moved with his family shortly thereafter to Portland, Oregon, where he lived until the mid-1930s. By the time he graduated from high school in 1927, Blanc had already displayed a talent for mimicry and character voices. That awful Woody Woodpecker laugh came from one of Mel's class clown improvisations, for instance, but his post-school career was as a musician in the NBC Radio Orchestra and pit conductor at Portland's Orpheum Theatre.

Blanc married Estelle Rosenbaum in 1933 and the couple hosted a local radio program called "Cobwebs and Nuts," in which Mel provided all the voices (because the management was too cheap to hire more actors). Eventually, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Mel picked up a lot of work as a character actor on a variety of radio programs, not the least of which was as "The Maxwell," Jack Benny's car. He also voiced the first four Woody Woodpecker cartoons (thanks to that horrible horrible laugh) and did some work for Disney Studios, but was soon under exclusive contract to Leon Schlesinger's company, which produced all of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for Warner Bros.

Mel Blanc helped create some of the most famous characters in motion picture and television history: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Marvin Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Cat, Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote, and the Roadrunner, to name a few. By 1960, Blanc had switched to television cartoons, still for Warner Bros. Looney Tunes franchises (The Bugs Bunny Show and its derivatives), but also for Hanna-Barbera classics, such as The Flintstones (Barney Rubble and Dino), The Jetsons (Cosmo Spacely), The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (The Bully Brothers), and Yogi's Gang (Secret Squirrel) among many others.

In 1961, Blanc was nearly killed in a car crash and lay unconscious for weeks in the hospital. He was unresponsive to doctor's questions when they asked how Mel Blanc was feeling, but when they asked after Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig, he answered in the character voice. This went on for days until Mel Blanc finally woke as himself. Perhaps this is an apocryphal tale, but I like it. It's spooky. 

He made a few appearances as a human being in character spots on the Jack Benny program and other shows in the early 1960s, but stuck mainly with cartoon voicing and worked on nearly every popular Saturday morning cartoon up until 1989 -- including a lot of crap (I'm talking to you, Scooby's Laff-A Lympics), but the man enjoyed his work.

And he was so very good at it. If it weren't for Mel Blanc's tremendous talent and influence, we probably would not be enjoying the work of today's best and most versatile voice actors: Hank Azaria, Tom Kenny, Seth MacFarlane, Tress MacNeille, Harry Shearer, and Tara Strong, to name just a few. He raised the bar incredibly high.

Mel Blanc died of heart disease on July 10, 1989, surrounded by his family very much loved and very much missed.