A Tale of Two Kitties

Having the DVD of They Died With Their Boots on out, and not having done a post on a cartoon recently, I decided to watch the animated short that's one of the extras on the DVD, A Tale of Two Kitties.

The movie starts off with two cats who don't seem anything like any of the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies characters we're familiar with, instead looking like they're supposed to be Abbott and Costello or something. (IMDb lists the characters as Babbit and Catstello.) It's a bit surprising too since Abbott and Costello weren't Warner Bros. contract players, but here we are. In any case, Babbit wants Catstello to kill a bird for the two of them to eat, because apparently Babbit can't do it himself.

Babbit is particularly cruel to Catstello, and then when Catstello gets to the nest, we see the bird:

Ah, it's obviously Tweety, especially because the bird says, "I tawt I taw a putty tat!" But this nascent Tweety bird has no feathers, making him look kind of creepy. But already Tweety is able to put one over on his nemesis, constantly making poor Catstello suffer. The short having been released in 1942, there's also civil defense references. More surprisingly, there was a joke about Catstello saying he wished he could give Babbit the bird. Talk about double entendres!

Overall, this isn't one of the best efforts from Warner Bros., however. It runs a bit shorter than a lot of the other Merrie Melodies shorts and feels like more of a one-note joke than other shorts, even if the others are only one-note too. But it's interesting to see the debut of Tweety bird.