Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
A cat on the back fence is yowling through the night and Betty cannot sleep. She leans out of the window and asks it politely to stop; the cat answers "not ne-ow" and yowls on. Pudgy is sent out to deal with it. The puppy's campaign against the cat occupies most of the film: he is lured onto the fence and falls off, is tricked into a dustbin, is scratched, is chased by the cat he is supposed to be chasing, and climbs back to the window more than once to report failure. At length, by a stroke of luck, he routs the cat and the night falls silent. Betty settles down gratefully, and the final shot pulls back to show every cat in the neighbourhood lined up on the fence outside her window, opening their mouths together.
Why It Matters
- The cat's answer, the title's "not now" turned into a miaow, is the kind of verbal gag the Fleischers loved, and Jack Mercer, soon to be Popeye, supplies the voice; the ending, with the chorus of cats, is a good example of the studio's habit of ending a cartoon on the joke restarting.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States and is one of the Pudgy-versus-animal cartoons that make up most of the 1936 Betty Boop output, with Betty as bystander and Pudgy as the hapless hero; it shares its premise with Stop That Noise from the year before.
Notes and Trivia
- Hicks Lokey and Myron Waldman animated nearly all of the 1935-36 Pudgy cartoons as a team.
- The gag of the cat answering back was reused by Famous Studios for Popeye in Shuteye Popeye, with a mouse.
- See also: Stop That Noise (1935), Betty Boop and the Little King (1936), Shuteye Popeye (1952).
