Cat's Meow

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?

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.