Felix the Cat & Yeti
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 28th, 2008
Okay, this may be merely a Felix the Cat cartoon, but it also may be one of the worst illustrations of misrepresentations in comic history. This cartoon with Felix the Cat and the Abominable Snowman is from 1958.
How many misstatements and mistakes do you see in it? (No, I’m not really upset. I’m just playing along with some kind of mock insult to our cryptozoological legacy.)
Some of the errors I caught are:
- Abominable Snowmen at the North Pole (the Arctic) - They actually are reported to live in the montane valleys of the Himalaya and cross the snowfields, allegedly, when visiting other cartoon characters in neighboring valleys.
- Chinese-appearing Inuit (”Eskimo”) living in igloos at the North Pole (a bit of the old tyme racism, humm) - Wrong, wrong, wrong.
- Four-toed humanlike footprints left as Yeti tracks - Incorrect, they are usually five-toed and more anthropoid.
- Left and right footprints being made with a right-footed fake. Ooops.
- White, snowy and/or icy appearance of the Abominable Snowmen (”fake” and “real”). Yeti are actually reported to be reddish brown to black, except in wrong-headed and hastily written media rehashings.
- Height of Abominable Snowmen. How tall do you think that huge “real” one is in this cartoon? Twenty-two feet high? Did someone say “True Giant”?
- That map of North America, with Alaska located above Canada, as an ice sheet, and being the same as the “North Pole.” Cartoon artists are not geographers. Please check your maps, captain.
I’m amazed that those of us growing up in the late 1950s and the early 1960s didn’t completely flunk out of school if we took some of these cartoons as facts turned into comics. Yikes.
Thanks to Henry for bringing this to my attention today.
That kind of low budget cartoon animation is just wrong on so many levels! hehe… I am glad that you put up a list for a guide though. The shocking thing is how anyone (man or beast) can survive all of those horrid falls. The racist Inuit is not as bad as some I have seen.
I’ve found another!
Cats don’t talk
Gee, the bad guy must have been pretty well off, financially. He had color tv in 1959.
This cartoon is definitely inferior to Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, etc, but of course, those cartoons had pretty inaccurate depictions of certain animals (roadrunners and Tasmanian devils for example), and some of their portrayals of certain ethnic groups were not exactly PC. And of course they didn’t always obey the laws of gravity!
“Four-toed humanlike footprints left as Yeti tracks”
Not to be too geeky, but it is not uncommon for animators to draw hands and feet with only four digits, it gives them less to animate. Look at the hands of Felix and the Professor, your will see that they show three fingers and a thumb. The Simpsons is more recent example — all have four digits, except for god who is shown with five digits
Nicole
Well, you know, the bipedal anthropomorphized felid with a magic bag are also a tad inaccurate, Loren, but COME ON!
the biggest mistake i believe?
when pat sullivan sold Felix the Cat’s rights and allowed the venerable feline to be so horribly abused as in these later, color, “Felix can now talk” ‘toons!
arrrghhh! give me the silent b&w Felix anyday!
My word! Is there anything that is not on You-Tube?
lol felix is sticking out of the submarine when it is underwater.
when the professor was stopped by the crossing guard, I was expecting the worst error that almost everybody has done…I was waiting for penguins to walk by. Except for the recent PC penguin movies, the cartoon industry has a history of either putting penguins at the north pole or polar bears at the south pole. Thanks, Loren, I now remember why I never watched Felix.
Nice voice work by Jack “Popeye” Mercer, beautiful background paintings, excellent character designs, terrible writing, haha. Stunning color sense and use back then, not to be found in the amateurish-looking cgi crap churned out by the big houses these days.
Excellent comments, chupachups!
I certainly was celebrating the enjoyment and humor of this cartoon by placing it here. Sorry if that was lost on anyone by my deadpan comedic relief in posting the errors in the cartoon.
It’s a unique piece, taking a trip down memory lane, with the Abominable Snowman waiting in the snowbanks.
Wow! I watched Felix on TeeVee regularly as a young tyke. It never occured to me until now that The Professor may have had a connection with Ray Wallace. They appear to have been up to the same shenanigans at about the same time. Although the pogo stick method of planting fake tracks the Professor uses here does seem more technologically sophisticated compared to Wallace’s strap on feet, they appear to be contemporaries at the very least. What I really wonder though, is why the Professor didn’t employ his regular henchman, Rock Bottom, to make the tracks. They’d have imprinted much more deeply because of his much larger physical size, and would have looked more authentic as a result.