Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Buzzy the Crow's second film pits him again against the dim black cat of The Stupidstitious Cat, this time a hypochondriac. The cat, convinced he is ill, consults Buzzy as a doctor, and Buzzy, who would otherwise be dinner, diagnoses one ailment after another, nine in all for a cat with nine lives, and prescribes cures that are each worse than the disease: the cat is dosed, bandaged, plastered, electrified and generally wrecked in the name of medicine, with Buzzy keeping half a step ahead of his patient's appetite. The film's soundtrack is lost, so the dialogue that carried the gags can no longer be heard, and the account above follows the surviving picture and the series filmography.
Why It Matters
- It is a curiosity of film preservation: the only pre-1950 Noveltoon that was not sold to National Telefilm Associates for television, so it never circulated in the TV prints that kept the others alive, and its sound elements disappeared. The picture survives and has been remastered in 4K from the original negative, silent.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, which is why the silent restoration could be released freely; it is also the second Buzzy cartoon, and Buzzy's medical patter, voiced by Jackson Beck in his Rochester manner, is known only from scripts and from the later Buzzy films that reused the premise.
Notes and Trivia
- The title puns on the cat-o'-nine-tails, the sailor's whip.
- The Buzzy series ran to about a dozen films, the last in 1954.
- See also: The Stupidstitious Cat (1947), Naughty but Mice (1947), Crazytown (1954).
