Following the success of The Flinstones, Hanna Barbera tried to replicate the formula by unofficially adapting another successful sitcom. For Top Cat, they took the premise of The Phil Silvers Show and transferred it from a U.S. Army base to Manhattan, New York’s fictional Hoagy’s Alley. Top Cat (Arnold Stang doing a Phil Silvers imitation) leads a sextet of anthropomorphized talking cats that includes Benny the Ball (Maurice Gosfield, who portrayed Private Duane Doberman on the Silvers Show), the intellectual Choo-Choo (Marvin Kaplan), scarf-wearing Fancy-Fancy (John Stephenson, doing a Cary Grant impression), beatnik Spook (Leo De Lyon), and ironically named Brain (also De Lyon). Trying (and failing miserably) to keep the cats in check is NYC Police Officer Dibble (Allen Jenkins).
Buy Top Cat: The Complete Series Blu-rayOver the 30 episodes that were created, which appear in production order spread across four Blu-rays in The Complete Series set, Top Cat and the gang get into typical sitcom shenanigans. For example, Top Cat impersonates “The Maharajah of Pookajee” so he and the boys can live it up in a fancy hotel; Benny looks like “The Missing Heir” to a fortune that the butler and dog were hoping to claim it and are willing to kill to get it; and in “T.C. Minds the Baby,” he and the gang have to care for an infant that was abandoned in the alley by its mother. The humans they encounter never seem phased by talking cats walking around on their hind legs and wearing clothes.
Attentive viewers may notice references to other characters from the Hanna-Barbera Universe. In “A Visit from Mother,” there is graffiti on a wall from El Kabong, Quick Draw McGraw’s alter ego. In “Rafeefleas,” prehistoric man statues resemble Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, whom Choo-Choo claims to have seen on television. (Is The Flintstones a TV program in the Top Cat world?) Also in “King for a Day,” Brain and Spook are reading a Yogi Bear comic and a Huckleberry Hound comic, further compounding the confusion.
The video has been given a 1080p/MPEG-4 AVC encoded transfer displayed at the original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Sourced from new 4K scans of the original camera negative, the image looks clean with mild film grain. The colors are presented in strong hues (and on a few occasions objects change color due to errors made in production, such as Benny’s hand changing or a hat Top Cat wears). Blacks are inky and contribute to the lines on most objects in foreground to separate from the background. The audio is available in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Dialogue sounds clear as does the music and effects. The track sounds free from signs of age and defect.
The Special Features are:
- Audio Commentaries–Animation writer Earl Kress, voice actor Leo De Lyon, animation historian Jerry Beck, and comic book/animation writer Mark Evanier have amusing chats during “Hawaii, Here We Come,” “A Visit From Mother,” and “The Late T.C.” offering insight and trivia about the episodes and the series.
On Disc 4:
- Back to Hogan’s Alley: The Making of Top Cat (17 min) – Hosted by Leo De Lyon, this featurette includes archival interviews of William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, and more.
- Storyboard / Finished Cartoon Sequence for “The Missing Heir” (21 min) – As described, the cartoon plays as the storyboards appear.
- Cool Cats in Interview Alley (21 min) – Kress hosts a panel with voice actors De Lyon and Marvin Kaplan, and show writer Barry Blitzer, who also wrote for the Silvers Show.
- Top Cat Sing-Along (1 min) – The theme song plays while the words pop up at the bottom of the screen.
- Top Cat Collection of Art, Stills, Sketches, and Backgrounds (7 min) – It’s a video gallery so have your finger on the pause button if you want to study the images.
- Vintage Commercials (3 min) – Two black and white Corn Flakes ads, and one mention of Kellog’s cereals presenting the show in the opening credits.
Top Cat is amusing in that ’60s-sitcom way where everything gets wrapped up by an episode’s end and never impacts another episode, so it doesn’t matter what order they are watched. The Blu-ray delivers a pleasing high-definition presentation and the special features from the DVD release have been ported over. Fans of the show should certainly be happy with this release.
