User Reviews

This is an early Terrytoons silent cartoon. There will be spoilers ahead:

Paul Terry was interested in making money. He made his cartoons as cheaply as possible in order to maximize profits. This cartoon is a perfect example of this philosophy.

An all but plot less cartoon, it follows a cat through his day, starting with his being pushed in what is essentially a cart by a mouse. Here occurs the first of several instances of reused footage in order to pad the running time and reduce costs, as footage of the mouse pushing the cart is reused at least three times.

The cat then uses the mouse as bait to catch a fish that the cat then eats. More repeated footage. The mouse then becomes the cat's caddy, carrying his clubs and even serving as the tee! Here the most clever gag in the short is made tedious by reusing the footage four times.

The mouse takes off and the cat, for some reason, fetches a guitar/banjo and begins serenading a female cat. Here, the character later known as Farmer Al Falfa makes a cameo appearance, using the crescent moon as a boomerang in order to express his disapproval of the noise.

The cat's lady fair actually falls on him and he retaliates, then wanders off. Short attention span. He spots mice doing calisthenics and gives chase, then devises a trap, resulting in more retreaded footage. The final gag is an old saw, but reasonably cute, so I won't spoil it here.

This cartoon is worth watching.

A cat lives a comfortable, aimless life in this, the third 'Aesop's Fables' cartoon.

The jokes and gags of this cartoon are an odd-looking bunch, They show off some decent gags about a wastrel cat-about-town and much cheating, in the form of a couple of sequences that are looped multiple times to stretch out the length of this cartoon -- one gag in which the cat traps mice and another in which he uses a mouse as a golf tee and swipes off its head. In addition, Paul Terry's Farmer Alfalfa shows up briefly.

What makes this cartoon excellent for its early date is the extensive and, for the period, advanced used of backgrounding. Cartoon cels had only been in existence for a couple of years, and for the remainder of the silent era the backgrounds of silent cartoons would remain largely minimal and sketch-like. In this one, however, they are quite substantial, even if some of them seem borrowed from or intended for other cartoons -- the cat serenades a lady cat who resides in a castle right next to Alfalfa's farmhouse!