It’s easy to be the flavour of the month, but it’s much harder to be timeless. Look at Tiffany and then look at Madonna. Tiffany has been reduced to hawking her one famous song around slack-jawed nostalgo-fests like Hit Me Baby One More Time, while Madonna is still going strong, making films as bad as ever.
This week’s hecklerspray hero is someone who has lasted; someone who, though he was only around for a relatively short time, has seared himself onto the global consciousness. He’s the boss, he’s a pip, he’s the championship. He’s the most tip top, Top Cat.
Top Cat was a primetime, 30-episode Hanna-Barbera cartoon that was first broadcast in 1961. The episodes usually revolved around our hero, Top Cat, outsmarting the useless local law enforcer Officer Dibble with the help of his magnificently-named followers – Fancy Fancy, Spook, Benny, Brain and Choo Choo.
He’s a hero because he managed to stand out from the pack of bland or useless Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Huckleberry Hound was an idiot who couldn’t hold down a steady job, Yogi Bear‘s obsession with picnic baskets bordered on the unhealthy and Quick Draw McGraw was nothing more than a horse with a gun. A horse with a gun!
Top Cat succeeded because it wore it’s influences very much on it’s sleeve. It was basically a cartoon rip-off of one of the best, most popular sitcoms of all time – The Phil Silvers Show (Sgt Bilko). How could it fail? Imagine any sitcom you like, but all done with cartoon animals. Wouldn’t it be great?
Instead of Del Boy hilariously falling through a bar, why not have a cartoon goat in a sheepskin jacket hilariously falling off some scaffolding? hecklerspray thinks there aren’t enough cartoon rip-offs of sitcoms in the world.
Top Cat was cool, too. Remember that in the early sixties, you could call someone a "cat" and not be punched in the mouth. Happy days…
He was a hungry underdog, always striving for more but never quite getting there. He was just a little too cynical to ever get ahead in life. When a rich maharajah gave him a bag of rubies, he threw them away because he thought they were fake. When a billionaire philanthropist gave him a cheque for a million dollars, he tore it up because he thought it was a fake.
The show could be touching (see the episode Space Monkey, where TC flies a rocket to Africa to help a homesick chimp), and it could be violent (Sergeant Top Cat pretty much ends at gunpoint).
Though an indisputably classic show, Top Cat still had it’s failings – like the Hanna-Barbera trademark halfhearted canned laughter track – and British viewers ended up monumentally confused because the titles were changed so we thought the show was called Boss Cat.
But still, if we ever need the services of a streetwise bright yellow alley-cat in a waistcoat, we know where we’ll turn.
Search for the cheapest Top Cat videos and DVDs at Kelkoo.co.uk
[story by Stuart Heritage]