Katnip Kollege

Watching the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, one can see that they had a thing for jazz. In "Katnip Kollege", the focus is on swing music, as a feline in school can't keep time and gets made the dunce...until he figures out the beat. Even though I love the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, it always seemed to me like their musical cartoons from the '30s tried a little too hard to be cute. Of course, any emphasis on swing music is something to be acknowledged. Still, I prefer their other music-centric shorts (such as "I Love to Singa", "Three Little Bops" and "What's Opera, Doc?").

Anyway, this one's worth seeing as a historical reference, if nothing else.

Katnip Kollege is a small school for anthropomorphic animals. One class is "Swingology". The teacher selects various students to perform. He calls upon Johnny Cat, but the Cat can't do it. He puts the Cat in the Dunce cap. During that night, the students are performing out in the moonlight.

This Merrie Melodies cartoon is more or less the music video of its time. WB digs up these under-used songs to highlight. The characters are relatively disposable. The teacher is probably referencing somebody from the era. The music is fun if dated. It is not my taste, but I can tolerate it. As far as these go, this is a good one.

If you like "swing music," and are a "young cat" at heart, you'll love this Looney Tunes animated short.

At Katnp College, "swingology" is one of the subjects and the students are having a great time. The professor is hilarious and has "everyone's sonnets sounding like Kostelanetz" expect when Johnny gets up to perform. He doesn't know what to do and winds up in the corner with a dunce hat on and ostracized from the rest of the students.

Later that night, the "rhythm bug" suddenly hits Johhny and now he's one cool cat.

This a colorful, musical effort. How much you like it will depend what you think of the music. It's very dated, but it swings enough for me to enjoy this. The colorful clothes on all the characters was fun to see, too.

Another musical short that is more cute than humorous is this short about some swinging cats singing in music class. One cat just doesn't get it and is ridiculed unmercifully because of it. Of course he gets it together by the end, but it still made me feel sorry for him when he lacked rhythm. This short wasn't as good as "I Love to Singa" (which was over praised to begin with) But it's cute enough to at least watch one time, perhaps even twice (but not in a row) and the tunes doesn't seem to make one openly cringe. This animated short can be seen on Disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2.

My Grade: C-

Katnip Kollege (1938)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fast-paced and very fun animated film takes place at Katnip Kollege, a swinging college to teach cats how to swing. The class is "Swingology" and one student gets made fun of because he doesn't know how to swing it but he plans on changing that before the big dance that night. There's certainly nothing ground-breaking here but there's no question that this is one of the more entertaining shorts from this era. The animation itself is certainly nothing too flashy as the cat designs are quite simple but this actually helps the film in a strange way. Another thing that really helps are the two music numbers because they're quite catchy and fun to listen to. It also doesn't hurt that the sex kitten appears to have been fashioned after Clara Bow, which was pretty interesting and especially since Bow hadn't made a movie in several years by this point in time. Fans of animation are certainly going to want to check this one out as well as those who just enjoy that swing/jazz music.