Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
A stray kitten wanders in at Betty's door. Pudgy, suspicious at first, is won over, and the two play together while Betty sings the title song about the pleasures of company. The kitten finds a box of candy and eats the lot, and is promptly, miserably sick, lying limp on the rug with Pudgy nosing him anxiously. Betty takes charge: she looks up the remedy, finds that catnip is called for, and she and Pudgy set about dosing the patient, who revives, bounces off the walls in a catnip frenzy and ends the film restored to health and adopted, with Betty naming him Myron. The plot is slender, and the film's charm lies in the kitten's animation and the interplay with Pudgy.
Why It Matters
- The film introduces Myron the kitten, who returned in We Did It and Pudgy and the Lost Kitten and became Pudgy's regular partner; the sick-kitten scene is unusually tender for a 1936 cartoon, and the catnip cure is a rare screen appearance for that drug.
- It is in the public domain in the United States. It was animated by Willard Bowsky's unit rather than Myron Waldman's, which gives the kitten a slightly harder, bouncier look than the usual Pudgy films; Bowsky was the studio's Popeye specialist and later worked on Superman.
Notes and Trivia
- The kitten was named after animator Myron Waldman, who had created Pudgy from his own dog.
- Jack Ozark, uncredited, was a young assistant who later worked at Terrytoons.
- See also: We Did It (1936), Pudgy and the Lost Kitten (1938), You're Not Built That Way (1936).
