[Hello there! This page seems to have become really, really popular for some reason, so thanks for dropping by... but it's getting more than five times the hits of any new post which isn't really the done thing, so... why not have a look around? There's loads of interesting stuff to delve into, including a podcast - see the front page for the latest one - and a book based on this very blog, which you can buy here. Cheers!]
[click to enlarge]
What would you – yes, you personally – call the loveable cartoon character depicted above? Top Cat? Boss Cat? 01:30:56:10? It’s quite an interesting poser.
…y’see, when the BBC bought the rights to Hanna-Barbera’s most popular long-running Bilko-riffing battle of wits between a bunch of wisecracking cats and the long arm of the law set on Precinct 13 (as in Assault On) in the early 1960s, they had somehow overlooked the fact that Top Cat shared its name with a popular brand of cat food. As they weren’t allowed to give any form of even unintentional or accidental promotion to any commercially available product, this presented something of a problem. And their ingenious solution was simply to change the name.
This was easy enough to implement when it came to continuity announcers and Radio Times billings (although they don’t seem to have managed to persuade the various manufacturers of tie-in merchandise to follow suit), but the whopping great onscreen captions in the middle of the animated opening and closing titles announcing that this was Top Cat and certainly not Boss Cat were a different kettle of fish. The even more ingenious solution was simply for someone wearing a blindfold to hack the offending frames out with a blunt pair of scissors.
As a result, the opening titles ran through their usual sliding-down-a-limousine-and-yanking-a-coin-on-elastic shenanigans up to the point where the wheeler-dealing feline sat down at a restaurant table and tucked a napkin into his waiscoat, upon which it immediately and crudely cut to a specially made caption card, featuring our hero in a generic pose and the legend Boss Cat in cartoony 1960s lettering on a blue background, omitting his theft of a workman’s lunch pail and hightailing it in a taxi with the show’s logo superimposed.
Meanwhile, the end credits were even more ridiculous. This time, the removal of the superimposed caption not only led to a jump cut in the changing-into-nightwear action, inexplicably lurching from his snapping on of eyeshades to slamming the lid of his trashcan home down on himself, but also in the musical accompaniment, jumping jarringly from that jazzy trumpet voluntary instrumental bit straight into the middle of another lyric. In fact, not even as neat as jumping into the middle of a line; it literally cackhandedly edits into the middle of a word (“-verything! He’s the most tip-top, Top Cat!”). Never mind the supposed mass confusion over that inaudible “providing it’s with dignity“/”bromide it gets whipped in the tea” line – this was the real point of confusion for any youngsters watching Boss Cat. Well, apart from the fact that the song, and all of the dialogue in the show, continually referred to one Top Cat.
Eight out of ten owners’ cats clearly didn’t prefer Top Cat to other leading brands, as they seemed to cease trading some time in the 1980s, upon which the BBC promptly purchased a set of shiny new unedited prints. But did this mean that Boss Cat became lost in some sort of popular cultural ether? It’s likely that the edited versions were all binned, and quite rightly so you may think. But don’t you feel just the slightest tinge of nostalgia for those ridiculous edits and that risible caption card? And what do you call him?
01:30:56:10
The earliest instance of the number sequence from Lost? Stranger things have happened…
And for the record: Top Cat. It’s what was being said in the song, even if the titles said Boss Cat, plus I think that’s what my parents called it. Which opens up a whole nature vs. nurture can of worms that I don’t think we have time for.
If you were visually impaired, then the rebrand was of really no consequence.
TJ – I remember The Impossibles: “Coil Man! – He makes the scene when things look mean…Fluid Man! – Stays on the spot, the spot that’s hot…Multi-Man! – Make like a crowd, no crooks allowed…Impossibles…Impossibles…IMPOSSIBLES!!!”
Blimey, I loved that show.
Interesting coincidence you mentioning The Impossibles – as the BBC inflicted another name-change on that show, though in quite a different way. There were no alterations to the programme itself but throughout its original run, the Radio Times would invariably refer to Liquid Man rather than Fluid Man.
Where did that still frame of the Boss Cat title come from? I remember watching it this way so well but assumed the uk prints were long gone. Is this from a video sequence of the titles that can be accessed? I’d love to see it with the bad edits again!
The title thing used to cause polarisation at our school. Some called it BC and others TC! I was always the latter as that was what he was called throughout the show. It’s his name. I do have affection for the Boss Cat version though, purely out of nostalgia.