The Cats Bah

Sometimes when I watch movies or cartoons, I feel a little bit like I'm spying on the characters. In "The Cats Bah", they put sort of a spin on that idea, as Pepe Le Pew starts out by speaking to the camera. While the Looney Tunes do that fairly often, Pepe hands the viewer champagne and a cigarette and an unidentified person - we don't even see the person's hand, though the person smokes and drinks - accepts them. After this, he goes into the story of how he chased American cat Penelope (whom he believed to be a belle femme skunk) through the casbah in what was probably Morocco. There were plenty of gags along the way.

So, it's a pretty entertaining cartoon. And that cigarette really made Pepe seem more French than ever. I mean, isn't it our stereotype of French men as foul-smelling lovers who smoke a lot? Worth seeing.

Yeah, camels do need to be ready for just about anything.

This one, like all the best Pepe Le Pew cartoons, depends principally on verbal humor rather than sight gags for most of the laughs (though the last gag is a sight gag that ends this one perfectly) and some of the jokes are obvious, while a few are subtle word play, such as the "ze bonds of slavery" line, when Pepe "frees" Penelope, to her horror. Pepe, like a great many folks throughout time, deludes himself. His delusion, charmingly enough, is that he is "ze great lover". That he continues his efforts in spite of his massive lack of success is either a tribute to perseverance or an indication of greater psychological trauma and detachment. I prefer the former theory. After all, to paraphrase Freud, "Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon." Good to excellent jokes make this a must see. Recommended.

"The Cat's Bah" is another cartoon favorite starring Pepe le Pew after watching the 1938 movie "Algiers," which gave some inspiration for Pepe's character. Also I had wondered what the Casbah is in the phrase "Come with me to the Casbah."

This cartoon is basically Pepe being interview about "the greatest love" of his life, and as his story unfolds we see him meet Penelope Pussycat as a pet of an American tourist; then white paint splats on her back from a ship painter's brush. This cartoon was also the first one in which Penelope's name was mention, and was officially given the name ever since.

As I had said before: I do not have one particular scene I like because I love this cartoon from beginning to end.

Specifically, "The Cat's Bah" bears more than a passing resemblance to "The Continental," a television series of that era in which an actor named Renzo Cesana played an amorous type who offers champagne and cigarettes (and says supposedly-romantic things) to an unseen woman in his apartment, represented by the camera. That is essentially the setup for this cartoon. While funny enough, perhaps the ultimate Pepe cartoon, it is somewhat dated, not only in the presence of cigarettes but his overall treatment of females (in this case, a cat). It is perhaps no wonder that the cartoon has been so chopped up for television airing.

Okay, I'll admit it. I've really got a soft spot for Pepe Le Pew. He's practically the reason I started to love cartoons. He also taught me to set my mind on a goal and work up to it, not to mention take my French ancestry and love it.

This cartoon I find intriguing because the way it starts, with Pepe offering the viewer champenge gives this cartoon some depth. It helps enforce Pepe to really be one of the Warner Brothers' better characters. After so much Wile E. Coyote and RoadRunner, and so much Sylvester and Tweety, etc., they begin to lack much difference in their cartoons. So much anvils, dynamite, ACME products backfiring, and the like, it wears a little thin. But Pepe is a Looney Tune who is fairly dynamic, he's always kept fresh and funny in his cartoons (that, and he's just so cute). To me, he deserves to be appreciated a little more. "Just theenk, radiant flower, you do not need to come wiz me to zee Casbah...we are already there!" -Pepe Le Pew. It's a classic line.

BTW, this cartoon is also known for revealing the name of Pepe's primary object d'affection: Penelope. (she likes him, she is just a little shy.)