User Reviews

This was the first cartoon made for the reopened Warner Bros.-Seven Arts cartoon studio after originally closing in 1963 and then having the DePatie-Freleng production team make their cartoons for the next four years. In doing new cartoons, instead of going back to their classic characters with the exception of Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzalas, the new Warner team decided to introduce new creations like the title character above. In this one, a Colonel Rimfire is desperate for something to hunt. He then sees Cool Cat and exclaims, "I tawt I taw a puddy tat. A tiger-like puddy tat!" He pursues him on his mechanical elephant but Cool tricks him into falling down a cliff which we witness from up above with a small smoke indicating the impact. At around this point, the Colonel declares, "This means war!"...There's a few other stuff that happens like Cool mistaking the mechanical elephant for a real one but I just have to point out that during the synopsis, I mentioned three references to classic Warner cartoon traditions such as the first being Tweety's famous catch phrase, the second being what we see when While E. Coyote falls down after being outsmarted by the Road Runner and the last being what Bugs Bunny says in Chuck Jones-directed shorts when he is provoked. I found these references pretty amusing but most of the rest of the cartoon was just lame. Nice to hear Larry Storch outside of "F Troop", however, as both of the character's voices. So on that note, Cool Cat is only worth a look if you're curious about these latter-day Warner cartoons of the late '60s.

For a brief period, Warner Brothers got out of short animation in the early 1960s, closing the animation department in 1963, only to turn around roughly a year later and contract with Depatie-Freleng to produce more shorts at bargain-basement rates (the low budgets showed all too often. For a couple of years, they basically churned out Speedy cartoons and Coyote versus Roadrunner. Apparently, they realized man could not live on Speedy and Roadrunner alone (Lord knows, they tried) and they created some other characters, Cool Cat among them. Of the new characters, the ones for Cool Cat were probably the best conceived and effectively developed, mostly because of the voice work by Larry Storch. The shorts didn't always work, but Storch always made the best of it, often with some cheesy dialogue. The first is one of the better ones. Worth watching at least once. Recommended with above caveats, especially for Larry Storch fans.

This is the first Warner Bros. 7 Arts Production, which began in late '67. And Cool Cat is the most prominent out of all the characters introduced between '67 and '69. This also marks the first new, regular, major WB character in a long time after the lengthy run of Daffy/Speedy and Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner shorts from three years before. I'm not sure, but this might mark the premiere of the departure from the old, familiar, initial animation style of Warners', moving toward a more stylized look/vibe with Hanna-Barbera overtones. I remember seeing the Cool Cat cartoons that sometimes aired as part of Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon back in the '90s. I didn't remember what exactly happened in his self-titled debut short at first, but after reading the synopsis of it at Wikipedia, it became familiar to me and all the memories suddenly came flooding back. Anyway, this is the first of his featurettes that had him pitted against the English big game hunter Colonel Rimfire. Basically they were the latter day Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. However, the similarity of one pursuing the other is as far as they go. True that Cool was never really that much of a Bugs Bunny, since he never donned any disguises to fool his antagonist for one. But then again, that's a good thing. I'm glad he wasn't totally like Bugs so that he could still be distinguished and not be too much of a carbon copy, and had his own identity, which is better and more likely the preferred of the two anyhow. And that's just fine. Cool and Rimfire would later become frequent cameo guest stars on the mid-'90s WB animated t.v. series The Sylvester And Tweety Mysteries and appear in the 2000 straight-to-video/DVD movie Tweety's High-Flying Adventure. They're also the only '60s WB characters to date to make any further appearances in other media outside of their classic era cartoon featurettes.

In his primary short, Cool is targeted by Rimfire, who travels in a mechanical pink elephant named Ella around a jungle somewhere in Africa. But then Ella goes missing and there's some confusion with Cool mistaking Ella for a real elephant who seems to be new to that particular jungle, he befriends her and shows her around. Meanwhile, Rimfire mistakes a real elephant for Ella, who he thinks he finally found at one point, making this sort of a switcheroo. But when he finally realizes his error, this ends for him with misfortunate results. But attempt after attempt at capturing Cool just doesn't go quite as planned.

Despite the somewhat seemingly slow start, Cool and his cartoons would luckily ameliorate as they progressed. I like the nice touch of the reference to one of the previous Looney Tunes characters' (Tweety) renowned catch phrases when the colonel said the "I tawt I taw a putty tat" line as he spotted Cool. And one of the best parts is when he accidentally, and unwittingly, gets his dentures clamped on the pin of a grenade as he bites it. His dentures are pulled out and attached to what is also passed off as a pseudo-pineapple. He uses the faux pineapple as bait. After Cool offers Ella the pineapple and she fails to respond to it, he tosses it back to the area where Rimfire is. Rimfire then hears chattering and he thinks the sound is made by a tarantula. He grabs his blunderbuss and shoots. By the time another error occurs to him, once again, it's too late and the cause of the detonation of the blast, from the explosive, destroys his dentures. He ends up gathering his teeth to put them back together, naming each kind of tooth one by one. Even though from what I observed judging by what I read, it's probably most people who'd consider the last 2 Cool Cat cartoons to be the most comical and the best. Regardless of the flaws, such as Cool's would-soon-be-irrelevant hipster jargon and image, it's still a good (if not great or even the best) Cool Cat featurette that has a few great moments. They'd figure out what else to do with him and how to make him slightly more compelling, as he'd come more into his own eventually.