Top Cat – The Complete Series

Top Cat – The Complete Series
Blu-ray
Warner Archive
1961 
Starring Arnold Stang, Maurice Gosfield, Allan Jenkins
Written by Kin Platt, Barry Blitzer, Michael Maltese
Directed by William Hanna, Joseph Barbera

In 1960, cartoon powerhouses William Hanna and Joseph Barbera found remarkable success with The Flintstones, a stone-age parody of Jackie Gleason’s kitchen sink rom-com, The Honeymooners. It wasn’t the first time Gleason got the animated treatment, in 1956 Robert McKimson directed the first of three Looney Tunes tributes; The Honey-Mousers, Cheese It, the Cat! (1957), and 1960’s Mice Follies. 

The Flintstones did break new ground though—it was the first prime-time animated show and it would outlast The Honeymooners by five years before closing up shop in 1966. Their unexpected success put Hanna-Barbara in the cat-bird seat but their next swing at prime time was not so lucky.

Debuting one year to the month after The Flintstones, Top Cat began on a Wednesday night in 1961, ran for 30 episodes and quickly disappeared. More’s the pity. The show was ostensibly modeled after yet another popular ’50s sit-com, You’ll Never Get Rich, starring Phil Silvers as part-time Sergeant and full-time conman Ernest Bilko. The chrome-domed, fast-talking Bilko was chief agitator of a platoon of eager-beaver toadies ready to assist the sarge in any of his get-rich quick schemes.

Top Cat used the Bilko model as its foundation but expanded its horizons, so to speak; it would embrace pop culture in surprisingly sophisticated fashion (one “gem” of an episode was Rafeefleas, based on Rififi, Jules Dassin’s French crime thriller about a supernaturally talented jewel thief) while paying tribute to Warner Bros.’ hardnosed comedies and gangster films of the 30s (though Top Cat began as a parody of Silvers’s show, it took as much inspiration from the Dead End Kids).

Rather than Leo Gorcey’s stomping grounds, Top Cat was set in an uncluttered alley in an anonymous neighborhood in Los Angeles. It was clean-cut fun with “TC” and gang going toe to toe with the neighborhood cop, Officer Dibble, who seemed to patrol just one city block in a city of thousands. The show stayed close to the studio’s brand; barebones art direction that wore its low budget as a badge of honor—the simplified approach only helped to accentuate the punchlines. Each episode charged out of the gate with a rambunctious theme song (an H-B speciality) and Top Cat‘s was particularly raucous (so energized Elvis Costello included it in his set list one night in Oakland).

The studio hired veteran comedy writers including Harvey Bullock (The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Real McCoys), Barry Blitzer (The Andy Griffith Show and McHales Navy), and Michael Maltese, whose contributions to animation are… well, legendary: Looney Tunes’s One Froggy Evening, What’s Opera, Doc, and Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century—not to mention his work on Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker and the majority of Hanna-Barbara’s output. Add Kin Platt to the mix, a veteran comic book scribe and children’s book author, and the show sparkled even when the action was geared toward kindergarteners.

The Flintstones was something of a one-trick pony, beginning life as a gimmick—every other pun referred to rocks or dinosaurs—and it survived by adding gimmicks on top of gimmicks; the show was like catnip for celebrities who were happy to ride the wave of the show’s popularity ala 1966’s Batman. Thanks to Platt and company Top Cat earned its keep with relatively smart plotting and savvy dialog.

With The Unscratchables and Naked Town, Top Cat spoofed the hardboiled hits of their own network, and Rafeefleas was a breezy affair that gave the Dassin film a cartoonish twist. The dialog was sparked by an amiable rogue’s gallery of impeccable voice artists including veteran radio actor Arnold Stang as Top Cat, the indelible nebbish Marvin Kaplan as Choo-choo, and human cartoon Maurice Gosfield as Benny the Ball (the sweet-souled Gosfield played basically the same role on the Bilko show.)

Classic Hollywood was represented by Allan Jenkins as Top Cat’s friendly enemy, Officer Dibble. Jenkins polished his unpolished image in some of Warner’s most incendiary films including Marked Woman and Three on a Match, but it was in his continuing role as “Goldie” Locks in Tom Conway’s light-hearted The Falcon series that his streetwise drawl and comic chops sealed his persona. He was a natural choice for the beaten down but optimistic Dibble whose fate would be determined by a crew of renegade felines. 

Warner Bros. has upgraded its 2006 DVD release with a sparkling Blu ray set containing all 30 episodes. There’s not much in the way of extras but the studio did port over supplements from the DVD set including the making-of documentary, Back to Hoagy’s Alley: The Making of Top Cat. Most entertaining is an interview with Marvin Kaplan, Leo Lyon, and Barry Blitzer sharing up close and personal insights into the production. Outside of the beautiful high def transfers of the episodes themselves,  a selection of Top Cat‘s Kellogg’s commercials is a convenient substitute for a Time Machine to 1961.