Hercules vs. the Giant Bug Thingammy

Hercules cartoons are horrible. They were horrible then, and they're horrible now, but what gets me is how excited we got about them. People wax very sentimental on YouTube about watching these when they were ten, though in some cases that was only about five years ago. These things are shown over and over again because they are a particular kind of bad that sort of tries to be good, and people like that. Kids in particular like that.

This is The Worst Hercules cartoon ever - it has to be - and I don't remember the title. This thing, this insect has a pink, vaguely humanlike body and limbs, which makes it especially disgusting, but it surely must have been easier to draw. I think silent gifs are preferable to the original, because what was there to listen to in these things? A horrendous theme song about "softness in his eyes, iron in his thighs"; three or four stock pieces of music played over and over and over again (bucolic shot of Caledon; theme of dark urgency, signalling arrival of Daedalus; thunder-and-lightning "magic ring shot" when Herc finally remembers, again, that he has to put the stupid ring on to get his super-strength; and that's about it, really). The dialogue is equally stilted. The very early ones had one set of actors, then abruptly changed to another set, probably at lower cost, and in one instance they change voices mid-cartoon. It's funny in a mildewed kind of way. And whenever Pegasus arrives, Herc goes through the same old ritual of "taming" him while he heaves and bucks around, emitting the same high-pitched stock-sound-effect whinny over and over and OVER again.

There's a youth called Timon, kind of a clone of King Dorian only not royal, and I used to wonder about him. He's the kind of kid who gets the crap beaten out of him in the schoolyard. He was always going to Hercules' gladiator school or whatever it was, to try to learn how to Be A Man, or else trying to save his sick mother who lay there all the time in the sickly thatched cottage he lived in. Poor but noble. Hercules has a special fondness for him, and I wonder about that, just as I wonder about the fact that he has no nipples.

Helena may just be the worst. She is The Female plugged in "wherever", particularly when Herc needed to rescue someone, though there is also a Bad Female with a mean cat (what was her name? Wilhemena or Willemena or however they spelled it). The rest of them are males, and I am sorry to say that not all of them are human.

But we watched The Mighty Hercules every day, and considered it on a par with all the other stuff we watched, whether it was slickly-produced Disney or quirky, inspired Max Fleischer, or Rankin-Bass with their stiffly-moving stick-figures. The Canadian-produced Wizard of Oz series was weak and badly animated, but we watched it. We just did. That was what was "on".

Top Cat in Brazil!

I should explain. One might call Top Cat a Latino phenomenon, a Spanish or Iberian or Ibero-American thingie, because for some reason these countries absolutely love him, even if characters' names and personalities are sometimes changed, and even the location shifted.

From Wikipedia:

In spite of the modest success of the show in the United States, the show was a massive hit in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina, where it is recognized as one of the most famous Hanna Barbera characters ever, being as popular as The Flintstones. In Mexico the show is aired under the name Don Gato y su pandilla (literally Mr. Cat and his gang) and the main characters adopted different accents. : Benny was renamed Benito B. Bodoque y B. and given a more childlike voice than was the case in the original dubbing, Choo Choo was renamed Cucho and spoke with Mexican-yucatan accent, Fancy-Fancy was Panza (belly), Spook renamed as the word's rough translation Espanto, The Brain was called Demóstenes (honouring the Greek statesman Demosthenes, with whom he shares a speech impediment) and Officer Dibble renamed as Oficial Carlos "Carlitos" Matute. This name, "matute" was used in Argentina and Uruguay as a slang reference for policemen. In Brazil, the character is known as Manda-Chuva (Brazilian Portuguese for big shot) and was voiced by actor Lima Duarte. In addition, the city of New York was replaced by Brasília (federal capital) in the Brazilian version.

SO! I also found an incomplete list of countries in which Top Cat was a hit, much more so than in the U. S. where it was cancelled after one 30-episode season (whereas the Flintstones went on for something like 35 years). T. C. was no more than a footnote in the Hanna-Barbera lexicon until he went international. VERY international, like this:

Mexico, Canada, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, S. E. Asia, Japan, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Poland, Hungary, Middle East and Africa, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela and OH SHIT, I cannot do any more!

Is this a sort of Fawlty Towers effect, where the scarcity of episodes makes the show that much more of a cultish hit? Perhaps it's the adaptability, though T. C. does seem more Hispanic than anything else. 

Top Cat: the theme song deciphered AT LAST!

In my rediscovery of the magnificent Choo Choo, who was perhaps my favorite cartoon character of all time,  I've been thinking about some of the mysteries of the Top Cat theme song lyrics. This is, as far as I am aware, the correct version.

Top Cat, the most effectual
Top Cat, who's intellectual
Close friends get to call him T. C.
Providing it's with dignity

Top Cat
The indisputable leader of the gang
He's the boss, he's a VIP
He's a championship
He's the most tip top
Top Cat

Yes he's the chief, he's the king
But above everything
He's the most tip top
Top Cat

TOP CAT!

By God! I never knew the line was "he's a VIP" until just now, after listening to it seventy-seven times. But now that I hear it, that's all it could be. Most lyric sites say "he's a pip", but it's definitely NOT "pip". For a long time, it sounded to me more like "bip". Finally I find a site that says VIP, and I think: no way, nevermore! But yes, it works, if you pronounce it like one word, "vip" (and I'm not sure which way you spell it, upper- or lower-case). This means "very important person", though "VIC" would be more accurate. 

Not only that: one of the "misheard" lyrics below just clued me in on something. I think the second and third lines are usually heard as "whose intellectual/close friends get to call him T. C", but that doesn't make any sense. NONE of his friends are intellectual, not even my darling pink-coated, fluffy-tailed, Brooklyn-accented Choo Choo. But TC is smart as a whip. 

So it makes more sense to say:

Top Cat, the most effectual -
Top Cat, who's intellectual -
(A slight pause, which you can actually hear in the song, then the next thought):
Close friends get to call him T. C.
Providing it's with dignity.

It even makes better grammatical sense, at least to me. I added the dashes just for dash.

Now, can you believe I found whole web pages devoted to "mondegreens" (misheard lyrics) for the Top Cat theme? The "providing it's with dignity" line was especially problematic for people, reminding me of the Flintstones: "let's ride with the family down the street/through the courtesy of flphghghvfllgheep." It's worse than the "you know it's up to you, I think it's only fair" in the Beatles' She Loves You (quick - what's the next line?)

So a lot of the best mondegreens come from that line, often leading to shocking references to "whipping". This is a children's show, for God's sake (though you'd never know it by the crookedness and delinquency of T. C.'s gang of reprobates).

Original lyrics:

Close friends get to call him T. C. 

Providing it's with dignity

Misheard lyrics:

Close friends get to Quality Street
Nobody ain't gets whipping for tea

Close friends get to call him T.C.
Come right in, it's whipping for tea.

Close friends get to call him T.C.
Come on in he's whipping the 't'.

Close friends get to call him T.C.
Providing there's whipped cream for tea.

Close friends get to quality, see?
Provided it's with the kitty.
l
Close friends get to call him T.C.
Pro-fighting is whipped in the tea. 

So. When this show first came on, I was seven years old. It surprised me to find that out, because I think I "got" quite a bit of the humor in it. I noticed that most of the background music had been recycled from The Flintstones. I absolutely loved Choo Choo. He was, and is, adorable. For some reason I remember T. C. brushing his teeth before going to bed in the garbage can, and missing one side. That really bothered me, because I had been nagged and nagged about the proper way to brush my teeth.

As for the "with dignity" line, mine was the worst of all:

Close friends get to call him T. C. 
Most cats are just dripping to see
Top Cat (etc.) 

What that means, I don't even want to speculate on.

For my money, this is the best cover version of the Top Cat theme, which is ubiquitous on YouTube. I'm thinking of doing a version myself. This guy's ukelele chords are incredibly sophisticated. He looks a little bit like the kid from Deliverance, but that just adds to the mystique.


(Why has this suddenly become a Top Cat blog? Well, why the hell not? It's not about anything in particular, not any more, since Harold Lloyd crashed in flames a few years ago. So now I just do it, put up what I'm interested in at the moment. And at the moment, it's this.)