Pizzicato Pussycat Backgrounds

Friz Freleng’s cartoons of the mid to late 1940s had lovely background work by Paul Julian, but as the ‘50s bumped along, Freleng evidently wanted more modern designs, with outlines and representational shapes.

He borrowed Dick Thomas from the McKimson unit for Pizzicato Pussycat, released in January 1955. Thomas gave Freleng stylised backgrounds. Here are some examples.



Here’s a nice representation of one of Hawley Pratt’s layouts.



Pratt’s main characters don’t have the same kind of appearance as Sylvester or, say, the mouse in Mouse Mazurka (1949), which have a fairly traditional Warner Bros. look.



Being the 1950s, it is necessary that a piano is decorated with a candelabra. Thanks, Lee. Thomas manages to get some colour variation in this panned background.



Yes, music is involved in this short. It’s a Freleng cartoon, after all. And being a Freleng cartoon, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Liszt figures into the score. But the classics get tossed out the window. When the cat uses sticks to try to bash the highbrow piano-playing mouse running around a drum kit, the music suddenly switches to jazz. And that’s what we hear to end the cartoon.



Milt Franklyn is given the on-screen music credit and I suspect he arranged his own score. It seems a little odd a 1920s bandleader would come up with a ‘50s jazz arrangement. But the tune in question goes back to the ‘20s. It’s “Crazy Rhythm” by Irving Caesar and Roger Wolfe Kahn. (The pizzicato string/flute cue over the titles is a Franklyn original. He digs back to 1905 for the next piece of music, the well-used “Me-ow” by Mel Kaufman).

This short was made around the time of the six-month Warners cartoon studio shutdown (a year for the McKimson unit). Manny Perez and Virgil Ross are the only animators mentioned on screen; Gerry Chiniquy and Ken Champin are gone (Chiniquy returned when the studio re-opened). Warren Foster, one of a handful of people kept on during the shutdown, wrote the story.

Besides Mel Blanc, the wife is played by Marian Richman, who was also employed by UPA and various commercial studios. The narrator is Norman Nesbitt, who is heard in a number of Warners cartoons around this time. Nesbitt was a newscaster and actor whose cartoon career ended when he left Los Angeles for KOA-TV in Denver at the end of July 1954. Nesbitt retired in 1959 to look after the estate of his brother John, who was the narrator of The Passing Parade radio/MGM shorts series, then came out of retirement in 1964. He died in Los Angeles on January 26, 1975.

Listen to “Crazy Rhythm” below. This version is a little less crazy.