Les chats boxeurs

Shortly after the early Kinetoscope experiment "Leonard-Cushing Fight", featuring the two boxers Jack Cushing and Mike Leonard in a boxing match, this movie got made at the Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studios, featuring two cats, fully equipped with boxing gloves, having a go at each other. So perhaps with some imagination you can call this movie the first ever made spoof and it certainly is the first ever done comical subject at the Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studios.

The subject of Professor Welton (exactly what was he a professor in I wonder?) Vaudeville's act of two boxing cats is sort of amusing and cute. No doubt that animal right organizations now days would do anything to ban this movie from being shown was it made today but truth is that this is a pretty harmless act. The gloves take away a lot of the blow, so no cats got harmed during the making of this motion picture and actually seeing cats fight on the streets with their claws is of course something far more violent and violent looking, even though it's just nature, unlike obviously putting gloves on a couple of cats and let them fight in a small boxing ring.

Henry Welton himself (the professor from this movie its title) sets the cats up against each other and he can be seen picking them up toward each other. These two cats obviously had no grudge toward each other but were put up to it to fight. Perhaps not the most kind thing to do but you also have to remember that this was 1894 when these sort of animal vaudeville acts were very common and part of everyday's life.

The camera is pretty close up to the fight but it covers the entire fighting area. It's not entirely symmetric, since it only shows one side of the ring. Nevertheless it's an effective composition, since it shows everything that needs to be seen and apart from its shaking images, it's perfect. The same can be said about the quality of the movie. Hardly any grain here in this one.

A nice little comical turn from the boys at the Edison Manufacturing Company.

8/10

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What was one of the biggest ways to cash in when it came to the motion picture industry? Simple answer: steal the popularity of other attractions, one of the best things the Edison Co. was good at. This is not at all to say that the great inventor was a crook who would do anything to get money (although some people who believe he actually did electrocute that elephant would say that) but it is true that during the company's earliest years in the filmmaking business, he would often hire athletes and performers who were huge hits at the time to come down to the Black Maria studio in New Jersey and do their routine for film. For the sake of protecting the man, I'd vouch it was not a way to steal away the glory of the performer but probably more for the sake of those who never had a chance to view the act for themselves. In this way, Edison would not really be taking all the fame for himself but instead advertising the sensation through the new motion picture system.

"Boxing Cats" is a good example of such a film. In this case, Edison hired Henry Welton (a professor of sorts, though I don't know of what) to come down to his studio in order to have his boxing cats act be filmed. Shown in medium closeup, the comical match (that is, comical to everyone except PETA members) is a twenty-second clip showing the cats going at it, while Welton stands in the background acting as the referee. Furthermore, because of the utter hilarity of the little gloves on the cats and the way they swipe at each-other, some consider this to be the first LOLcat video ever made and thus the oldest 'cat video' on the internet. From my own research this is certainly debatable, however; after all, Etienne-Jules Marey had created "Falling Cat" the same year with his chronophotographic gun, which could also be given the title despite the fact I know no dates to prove which came first. Clearly whoever started such a rumor has been little educated about this point in history or merely doesn't consider Marey's film a LOLcat video.

However, the most interesting point of "Boxing Cats" comes not from the historical interest surrounding it or the fact it shows a once-popular act of the day, but from the way it combines two different genres used previously in Edison company shorts to create a different variation. As I mentioned before, filming dancers, athletes or any sort of performers would help bring publicity to the sensation's act. This genre, the performance-for-camera genre, is the first one combined. On top of that, another big genre, which I treat differently from the performances, was boxing. Edison loved filming boxing and must have made a whole series of boxing shorts featuring known boxers performing a championship match within the Black Maria. Films such as "Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph", "The Leonard-Cushing Fight", "The Hornbacker-Murphy Fight", even the camera tests "Men Boxing" (1891) and "Boxing" (1892) all fall within the genre. Thus, by putting both together, you have a unique little performance which was no doubt a real hit when shown in the Kinetoscope parlors. On a side note, this wasn't the first time the company had done a variation on the boxing genre; the idea of having a comedic boxing contest between animals had occurred as early as "Monkey and Another, Boxing" (camera test, 1891).

"fWhen "movies" first began""...... I am tired of hearing it. Can we please stop patronising the past. In 1894 they filmed novelty acts just as they would continue to do throughout the decade and beyond. The genre became particularly common iafter the inroduction of the newreel and the "magazine" (c. 1909) and the highpoint for this kind of spectacle in the cinema probably occurrs in the twenties and thirties when such material filled the newreels shown certainly with other films but also shown in the many specialist newsreel cinemas which continued to exist until the advent of television. After which such novelty items continued to be filmed in just the same way for the small screen and they are today to be found all over the internet. There has been no very noticeable change in the nature of such films at any time.

This is not a every wonderful film. Edison films are extremely poor both with respect to quality and content compared with the work, just a few years later, of the Lumière operators in France which effectively pushed Edison and the rival Mutoscope company both to abandon peephole exhibition and to broaden and improve the content and quality of their films. But novelty acts involving acrobats, magicians, trained animals and so on remained part of the repertoire of all film companies until the 1910s when they began to be included in the newsreels and film magazines where they would remain until the advent of television. All that changes is the way the repertoire is organised and then the particular medium that transmits them. To confirm this fact, jsut do a google search for "boxing cats"....

Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's), The (1894)

**** (out of 4)

When "movies" first came to be, studios would often just grab their cameras and film something popular and then release it to the thousands who wanted to see it. Professor Welton was a popular vaudeville act and his main highlight was two cats, wearing boxing gloves, who would do battle in the ring. PETA members will certainly want to stay away as the Professor holds the cats by their backs and makes this box. While some might object to this I find the overall film rather innocent, charming and fun. Seeing the cats go at it for around thirty-seconds might not be entertainment like we expect today but I'm sure it was a riot back in the day.

Two cats, performers from Professor Welton's Cat Circus, paw at each other with boxing gloves on. I found them rather amusing and cute. The cats seem very well trained and the way they swing their paws actually looks somewhat like a boxing match. Boxing was a very popular sport in the 1890s and this parody was a big hit with kinetoscope viewers.

The Boxing Cats was directed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and William Heise at Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Even in 1894, footage of cats doing amusing things was a big hit.