Ah, but it’s not Santa at all. It’s Katnip!!! Don’t worry. Cousin Herman will come to the rescue and fill the cartoon with the spirit of the holidays. Like pouring boiling coffee down the cat’s throat. Ho! Ho! Ho!
This is the cartoon which infamously ends with Herman plugging Katnip’s tail into a wall socket and illuminating the lights strung over the seemingly-dead cat. I get all misty-eyed just thinking about that touching memory of Christmases past.
Bob Jaques, who is unimpeachable when it comes to this topic, identifies this cartoon as being made by the Tendlar-Golden-Reden-Taras unit.
By 1950, the studio's units had pretty much been locked into specific styles of cartoons, with Dave Tendlar's unit handling most of the ones everyone remembers as being the most violent, with Herman and Baby Huey (it is interesting to see Bill Tytla's one crack at the series before it was fully formalized, with 1949's "Campus Capers". The main bad guy design would later turn up as Katnip's rival, Spike, while Tytla shows his Terrytoons influence by giving all the secondary rodents Mighty Mouse ears and faces. Kind of a unique style crossover, similar to seeing Jim Tyer's mangling and 'popping' animation made famous at Terrytoons show up at Famous, in some of the mid-1940s shorts or a few of the 1960s Snuffy Smith cartoons).
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