Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures / The Vitaphone Corporation
Short Synopsis
From his apartment window, Sylvester spies on Tweety through a telescope. Tweety grabs a towel and slams his door: "I tawt I taw a peeping tom cat!" Tweety's birdhouse stands on a pole in a yard guarded by Spike the bulldog. Sylvester sneaks past the sleeping dog and up the pole, and Spike drags him down. Sylvester pushes Spike's scowl into a smile; Spike pushes it back to fury and chases him home. Sylvester tries a mechanical grabber, but Spike climbs a ladder and uses it to bang him against the wall. He builds a robot dog, which turns on him. He sets off a smoke bomb, runs into Spike in the smoke and is pounded. He bounces in on a pogo stick and grabs Tweety, but Spike opens a manhole and Sylvester drops in, the lid landing on his head. A storm-cloud formula backfires in his own room. He rubs on vanishing cream, but Spike sprays the invisible cat with green paint. Finally, at night, he builds a bomb disguised as a camera, and it goes off too soon. Sylvester reappears as a ghost with angel wings, tears up his blueprints, notes that it's a good thing cats have nine lives, and floats away.
Why It Matters
- The film is a rapid catalogue of Sylvester's inventions, each one defeated by Spike, and Freleng keeps the gags short and sharp. Spike pushing his own face back from a forced smile into a glare is a perfect bit of character animation.
- It shows the Tweety and Sylvester series late in Freleng's run, when the pair, often with Granny or a guard dog, had become one of Warner's most dependable formulas. The guard-dog variant moves the conflict from bird against cat to cat against dog, with Tweety as the prize.
Notes and Trivia
- Spike the bulldog, a frequent Freleng heavy, is the real antagonist here.
- The title puns on "sweet and lovely".
- See also: Tweety's S.O.S. (1951).