The Wonderful, Wonderful Cat
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this set, even before its appearance. Most of that centers around the claim on the cover to include "The Complete 1958- 1959 Full- Color Series". This set includes 31 episodes, a far cry from the 260 supposedly created. So what's going on? The Felix cartoons of this era are widely believed to run about four minutes each. The ones in this set run about seven minutes, almost twice as long. Possibly each episode was originally run in two parts. In that case, there would really have been 260 parts, making up 130 two- part episodes.
John Canemaker, in Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat, writes that Joe Oriolo's original plan was to create 260 episodes that could run as four minute individual episodes or a continuing quarter hour, depending on the station format. Many cartoons of the time ran as "cliff-hangers", multi- part stories that dropped off at the end of the episode, including Ruff and Reddy, Crusader...
This set is correctly named.
To my knowledge, this set is complete as advertised. I believe there were 31 episodes produced during the 1958-1959 time period. There were another 91 or so produced during 1960-1961, bringing the total to about 122. I don't know where the notion that Trans-Lux produced 260 some odd Felix cartoons during 1958-1959 came from. That would have been an incredible feat, even if each cartoon was only about 7 minutes in length. If someone has some evidence that there were indeed 260 shorts produced by Trans-Lux, I would sure like to see it.
The problem with this release is that there is no slipcover to hold the DVD package closed. At least mine didn't have one. So it can easily pop open. The cartoons look excellent and the menu is easy to navigate. If the packaging were better, I would have given it 5 stars.
It's 130 episodes on a technicality -- and then, enjoy!
Let's get this issue of "260 episodes" out of the way. Each "episode" of this show consisted of a first half with a cliffhanger pause and then a second half. The pause was there to allow a commercial, but the disc of course has no commercials, and so you get seven minute episodes with a minor "blip" in the middle. This DVD set is the first season of what was 130 episodes of the show, a number that tallies from lists in Lenburg's cartoon encyclopedia and elsewhere make clear.
And what a deliciously weird cartoon this was. The limited animation and UPA graphics become an aesthetic in themselves. Felix is, if we may overanalyze a bit, a fascinating abstraction, an oddly disconnected and almost pathologically happy being who serves only to frustrate "The Professor," who wants this magic bag Felix carries, although we are not told where Felix got the bag or what his purpose with the bag is except to be protected from anything the Professor pulls.
The voice work is...
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