Putty Tat Trouble

Putty Tat Trouble (1951)

*** (out of 4)

It's Christmas time and Tweety is out shoveling the snow from his nest when Sylvester and another cat spot him. The two cats go full battle to try and get Tweety but he's much smarter than them. I'm not a huge fan of the Sylvester/Tweety cartoons but this one here is pretty good because for the most part the two cats are fighting each other while the bird stays pretty safe. The cuteness of Tweety is certainly on full display as is his other side, which is perfectly shown during a scene where the two cats are on a frozen pond. There are some nice laughs throughout as well as some good action so fans of the two will certainly be entertained.

Funny Tweety and Sylvester short, directed by Friz Freleng. It's a fairly routine story - Sylvester and another unnamed cat see Tweety in his nest and decide to grab him. Throughout the cartoon the two cats fight each other to get at Tweety, with hilarious results. Tweety is adorable as ever and has several great lines. My favorite part from the whole cartoon is when Tweety talks to a plastic drinking bird that keeps dipping its head into a bowl of water ("May I have a dwink with you?"). Sylvester (who doesn't speak) and the unnamed red/orange cat are both fun. Excellent voice work from Mel Blanc and Bea Benaderet. Lively music from Carl Stalling. The animation is colorful and attractive. It's all beautifully-drawn and painted. Tweety shorts aren't for all tastes (as judged by the "must be fun at parties" types contributing some of these reviews), but if you like his cartoons you'll probably enjoy this one a lot.

Tweety is outside, shoveling the snow out of his bird's nest, mumbling that he shouldn't have wished for a white Christmas. In one building, Sylvester cleans off the window and spots Tweety while in an adjacent building, another cat - an unnamed orange feline - does the same. They both pound on the doors to have their respective owners let them out.

They race from opposite directions and arrive at Tweety's nest at the same time. From that point on, it's a battle to see who gets the bird. A short time later, the orange tabby thinks he won, but swallows a mechanical dunking yellow bird by mistake. That scene might have been the funniest.

Tweety looks like a goner a few times but always seems to come out unscathed while the two cats beat the crap out of each other.

In all, nothing super but entertaining and a nice DVD transfer. The colors are bold and the picture sharp.

I wonder why Sylvester doesn't just give up on trying to get Tweety. Clearly that bird has a bad-ass streak. But Sylvester keeps going after him, and in "Putty Tat Trouble" has to vie with an unidentified orange tabby around Christmas. Needless to say, their attempts have rather detrimental results (to them, that is).

I agree with a previous reviewer that Sylvester and the other cat could have just made a deal to divide up Tweety equally. But it appears that they're both really greedy (these toons have a real problem with that, don't they?). And anyway, their misfortunes are their own fault for trying to harm someone else.

So, it's not the best Sylvester-Tweety cartoon, but still worth seeing.

In the large Looney Tunes canon of some of the greatest cartoons ever made, the Tweety and Sylvester entries give them even further solidity by being one of their most popular series and never letting the audience down with a below par effort. Most, including this one in particular, have an elegance enhanced by the music of Carl Stalling. Many of the gags are of the two putty tats competing against one another to be the one to catch Tweety, but when the action comes out of the cold outdoors to the scene in the basement of one of the apartment buildings, we have one of those transcendental moments of pure Looney Tunes genius when the little yellow bird meets another little yellow bird perched on a glass of water.