Cool Cat is a 1967 Looney Tunes short directed by Alex Lovy.
Plot[]
A big game hunter named Colonel Rimfire is visiting an African jungle in his robotic elephant named Ella, but bemoans the fact that he hasn't seen anything worth shooting since he arrived. Shortly afterwards he comes across a tiger who is the title character, Cool Cat, who is walking through the jungle with a parasol. Seeing Cool Cat, Rimfire remarks "I tawt I taw a puddy tat! A tiger-type puddy tat!" and pursues him while hidden inside Ella. He eventually blasts Cool Cat with a shotgun hidden in Ella's trunk, but Cool Cat bends over to sniff some flowers right as the shotgun fires, and Rimfire only succeeds in destroying his parasol. Cool Cat mistakes Ella for an actual elephant and warns "her" that someone's shooting at them and that they should flee, which Cool Cat proceeds to do. Rimfire misinterprets this as Cool Cat warning him that someone else is attacking both of them, and tries to pilot Ella to safety, only to drive over the edge of a cliff and fall into a chasm.
Rimfire irately pushes Ella up the edge of the chasm back up to the jungle above, and Cool Cat helps Ella up to the top, not noticing Rimfire's presence underneath. With nothing to stabilize him, Rimfire falls back into the chasm. Still thinking that Ella is a real elephant, Cool Cat leads her away by her trunk to demonstrate some survival skills, while Rimfire climbs out of the chasm for a second time. As Cool Cat leads Ella through the jungle, an amorous male elephant gives chase to Ella, but is caught by Rimfire who makes the opposite mistake to Cool Cat and assumes that the male elephant is in fact Ella. After yanking at the elephant's skin looking for an entry hatch, Rimfire finally realizes that he is in fact dealing with a real elephant, to whom he apologizes, though this does not save him from being battered into the ground by the angry elephant's trunk.
After recovering from his beating, Rimfire notices Cool Cat looking for food, and decides to throw him "an exploding pineapple" in the form of a hand grenade. Instead of yanking the grenade's pin out with his teeth however, Rimfire unknowingly pulls his dentures out of his mouth with the pin, and tosses the unarmed grenade at Cool Cat. The tiger does mistake it for a pineapple and offers it to Ella, but after the mechanical elephant fails to react to it he tosses the grenade away, causing it to end up back with Rimfire. In turn, Rimfire mistakes the chattering dentures for a tarantula and whips out his shotgun to blast it, detonating the grenade and destroying his dentures.
Rimfire then decides to hide in an abandoned bongo that he finds in the jungle and blast Cool Cat when he comes near, but Cool Cat plays Ella a tune on the bongo when he finds it, which leaves Rimfire dazed. He repeats his plan with a large bush, but Cool Cat decides to demonstrate some "Jungle Judo" on the bush, battering Rimfire, then pushes Ella into the bush so that she can try the same thing, only for her to pass clean through the bush, and smash Rimfire on the side of a cliff. Exasperated, Rimfire finally gives up and tells Cool Cat that he's going to leave the jungle, only to discover that Ella has run out of petrol, and begins the two-thousand-mile journey to the nearest gas station. Cool Cat opens Ella's rear hatch and checks the engine, and remarks that "they just don't make elephants like they used to."
Availability[]
Streaming[]
Notes[]
- This is first appearances of the characters Cool Cat and Colonel Rimfire.
- Cool Cat would be the studio's most prolific character between then and the studio's final shutdown in 1969.
- This short marked a major change of direction for the then recently reformed Warner Bros. cartoon studio, as the first short in a long time to introduce a major new character (virtually every Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies short made in the previous three years had been ones featuring either Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, or Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, the latter were gone in 1966).
- This is the first short to feature updated opening and closing titles with the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts corporate logo and a more low-budget rearrangement of Bill Lava's take on "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down".
- When Colonel Rimfire falls into the gorge (twice), the background in the falling shots is a recycled background from "Zip 'n Snort" from six years earlier. It was also previously reused in "Lickety-Splat" the following year.
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