Cartoon fans Hanna-Barbera have produced alot of shows over the years but one show that nobody really talks about is the show that i'm going to talk about today so here we go with me review of Top Cat.
Now this is actually one of the shortest HB produced shows with only a single season of thirty episodes being made to put that into prospective the original Wacky Races technically had thirty four episodes while Scooby-Doo has had many many shows so when I say this is the shortest show they produced you can take that to the bank.
In America the show was indeed called Top Cat but when the show began airing in the UK the title was changed to Boss Cat the reasoning behind this was because there was a cat food company called Top Cat but tho even tho they changed the title they didn't count on the fact that the shows theme song says the word Top Cat quite alot and they didn't remove the name from the opening and closing credits so it became known as Top Cat anyway.
For those who either didn't know or straight up forgot the show was started airing on September 27th 1961 and finished on April 18th 1962 and was aired on ABC. The basic set up for the show was that Top cat and his gang would try various get rich quick schemes only to be cought by officer Dibble and I have to say that this set up does indeed work as it makes the plot of each episode feel fresh and different from the one that came before it.
The cast for this show consisted of Arnold Stang as Top Cat , Maurice Gosfield as Benny the Ball , Allen Jenkins as Officer Dibble , Marvin Kaplan as Choo-Choo , Leo De Lyon as Brain and Spook and original Mr. Slate actor John Stephenson as Fancy-Fancy. As with all previous HB shows the voices were impressions of famous celebrities of the time but for the life of me I cannot remember who they were impersonating but I can say that the acting really wasn't that bad all of the actors did a good job and they all put in a funny performance.
What I found out while watching the show was that even tho the show is set in New York there's only one character that speaks with a New York accent and it's Choo Choo (the above image FYI) and I can't figure out why that's the case since all of these characters are meant to be from New York wouldn't it there for make sense for them all to have an accent?.
What i thought was even more shocking was the fact that every episode was written by someone called Kin Platt I was shocked because it takes along time to produce a single episode of an animated show so having one writer write the whole thing start to finish was even in those days kind of unheard off.
The show was not only produced by Hanna-Barbera but the pair also directed all of the episodes heck no wonder they stopped at thirty episodes both the writer and the producers / directors most of been worn out. I will however say that the animation is pretty much the standerd HB affair with repeating backgrounds and in some episodes extremely limited animation but what kind of annoyed me was whenever they would show an overhead view of the city everything would be still even the people (if there were any) would just be still I know HB did things on the cheap but I didn't realise they were that cheap.
Here's something that might possible ruin alot of childhoods but Top Cat switches from being a con-man to a member of the mafia and to a confidence trickster really think about it for a second he cons the rest of the gang into giving him there money , he tricks people by saying that they are the best at what ever they do and there are episodes where he has to act like a mafia boss and most of the time he gets away with all of it Top Cat is the world's best criminal.
I couldn't do a review of this show and not mention the theme song to me the theme to Top Cat is one of the best themes in cartoon history it's catchy as heck , you can very easily sing along to it and it tells you straight up about the main character it does everything a good theme song should do and it does it all in forty seconds heck it's so good they reply it at the end of each episode.
Overall I highly recommend you check out this gem from the past it has some good jokes and some not so good jokes and the Spook character really hasn't aged that well but it's still wroth watching and it's way better then the last two Top Cat movies the show gets an 7 out of 10 from me.