Top Cat

T.C. for short	The Inner Circle	Officer Dibble	Hoagy's of Manhattan

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T.C. is the slickest, smoothest-talking alley cat in Manhattan. He and his crew are always looking for an edge, some way to rub shoulders with the elite and make just as much money. Too bad their schemes tend to have a way of blowing up in their faces.

I first saw this show quite by accident several years ago. My mum had checked out a DVD compilation of old Hanna-Barbera stuff from the library. The laugh track was a little grating on the nerves, but I loved the show immediately. At the time, the middle 20th century was hot shit and, being essentially a reformulation of a live-action sitcom from the '50s, Top Cat was '50s-adjacent. While I wasn't really as crazy about the '50s as others were (see also: the premium DLC for The Sims 3), I did always like the old cartoons from then. That was the peak of the 1st Golden Age of Animation, you know— the stuff that people like Joe Murray, Donovan Cook, and John Prickfellatio-- er, I mean "Kricfalusi"-- got inspired by to make their own cartoons in the '90s. I'll admit, I was getting a bit weary of slapstick cats who spoke with lisps and got outwitted by birds or mice, but Top Cat wasn't any of that. There were 2 episodes of the show available on this 2-disc set: "The Million-Dollar Derby" and "The Maharajah of Pookajee". While the jeopardies in both episodes were kind of racial stereotypes, I still liked it enough to watch it again, by myself, the next day. I don't know what it is that appealed to me, but I knew that if I'd known about this show in grade school, I would have drawn so much Mario/Top Cat crossover fan art. I might have even learned how to draw in Hanna-Barbera style in middle school so i could draw them all properly. Well, as though I can't do that already.

8 out of 10 stars

I love the aesthetics of this show. The art style, while typically Hanna-Barbera, has more detail than you'd expect from a throwaway prime-time cartoon show from the '60s. Also, the show's writing and acting makes it more like a real live-action show than most other cartoons. It plays for laughs, certainly, but it almost feels like the actors are doing radio theatre sometimes, with how fast the dialogue goes sometimes. I don't know what that studio's deal was when it came to laugh tracks (which, in general, are wholly unnecessary— why do I need to be told when to laugh?) but it feels like this show's initial plan may not have included one, since the actors never leave any room for a laugh to play out. Like I said, radio theatre.

At the moment, the entire programme is available for free on the Internet Archive, so you can give it a go if you like. If you're not familiar with cartoons from this era, they had a tendency to use racist and sexist microaggressions to facilitate jokes, and this show is no different, so be aware of that.

All things considered, the characters really grow on you. TC's rapier wit, Benny's naïveté, Choo-Choo's sensitivity, Brain's dim-witted honesty, the inept policeman, and... the sort of interchangeable Spook and Fancy. I don't know, maybe they'll make some effort to define those two a bit more. I haven't seen even half of the shows yet. It's worth noting as well that, either by accident or by design, various other H-B characters make cameo appearances, such as George Jetson, Wilma Flintstone, and Mr. Spacely of Spacely Sprockets. Clever marketing tactic? Or accidental re-use of characters by overworked studio? You be the judge.