I know Steve Stanchfield hates this cartoon -- today his weekly column at Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research site offered this as one of the five worst cartoons he's ever seen. I spent the first three months of this year looking at about 150 early Terrytoons just posted on Youtube and then trying to find intelligent things to say about them.
As a result, these appear to be meaningless rote efforts by Howard Post to fill out contracts. Paramount had cut budgets for cartoon to the bone and were selling the marrow. Post was trying to get interesting work done, but had to fill in the spaces with things like this.
Rat Ffink and Ffat Kat were a cat-and-mouse duo. True, the funniest things about them were their names, the art is minimal, the gags were unadorned and Winston Sharples' score sounds bored and uninvolved. That doesn't mean it was among the worst cartoons ever made or even cat-and-mouse cartoons made in the 1960s. I've seen some of the self-loathing Tom and Jerry cartoons made by Gene Deitch. While THE TOM AND JERRY CARTOON KIT is a brilliant bit of deconstruction, after that, it was all from hunger.
So this one is bad. It just ain't the worst of the worst.