Courageous Cat & Minute Mouse: The Complete Series (1960)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Created and Written by Bob Kane

Features:

• Bob Kane biography
  
• Four discs
  

Rating: NR, suitable for all ages

Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1.

My advice: This one’s for die-hard collectors and Baby Boomer nostalgia, only.

After gifting the world with one of its most enduring comic icons in the creation of Batman, Bob Kane was a popular guy. So it’s not surprising that somebody handed him the keys to a Saturday-morning cartoon, back in the era when that actually meant something. What he produced was Courageous Cat & Minute Mouse. Did I mention he created Batman?

The show is pretty much exactly what one would expect from early 60s animation. That is to say, not much. Animation is weak, voice talent is weak, and story is virtually non-existent. I am continually baffled by comparing shows of this era to the work coming out of Warner Bros. Animation at the same time. Looney Tunes look lightyears ahead of this stuff, even when comparing this show to Bugs Bunny material of two decades earlier.

Basically, the cat and mouse duo are a crime-fighting duo in the metropolis of Empire City, though all their enemies are incredibly silly, and our heroes tend to foil evil through dumb luck and the timely intervention of Courageous Cat’s ray gun, which seems capable of everything from destroying buildings to repairing cars. Minute Mouse exists basically to squeak in a high-pitched voice and get in trouble, thereby requiring rescue.

As mentioned above, none of the production values are particularly high. The animation is essentially hampered by mediocre line art combined with a choppy framerate that makes the whole show look jerky and half-assed. The voice acting is played over the top most of the time, and that can get pretty annoying (especially the squeaking of Minute Mouse). The episodes are short, as are most of the shows of its kind (allowing for 2-3 stories in a half-hour Saturday morning time slot), and each disc in the set contains approximately 30 shows.

The DVD does as well as can be expected, really. With four-decade-old animation film stock, it’s not surprising that the video looks fairly bad. Live-action shows from this era tend to look pretty decent, but animation was viewed as a largely disposable medium until decades later, and often used inferior stock and was not stored particularly carefully. I’m actually a bit surprised that A&E was able to recover a full set of episodes for inclusion in the set. It is an impressive collection, if only because it collects the entirety of the series on four discs (130 episodes).

Unless you’re a scholar of American animation, the only conceivable interest in this would be nostalgic, and unless you’re a Baby Boomer, you don’t remember this anyway. There are so many superior animation titles from the era (most of them from Disney or Warner Bros., but there you have it), I can’t imagine wanting to collect spotty, second-rate animation, even if it was written by Batman’s creator.