Almost everything you want to know about R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat and some things you probably didnt.
Hey, you fucking intellectuals and geeks, you think youre so where its at?
Hey, yeah, the movie was set in the 1960s.
Fritz was a cat whose soul was tormented.
He fought many a good man and laid many a good woman.
And probably a few bad ones.
This cat had riches and fame and adventure.
No joke, Fritz the Cat was made for $850,000 and bagged $90 million.
Fritz the Catwas written and directed by Ralph Bakshi.
He pitched Warner Brothers an inner-city street life script calledHeavy Traffic.
They passed on the film which would become his second cult classic.
Creme De La Crumb
I was eight when I read my first R. Crumb comic.
It came in one of two brown paper shopping bags filled with comic books my grandfather found.
I was fascinated by the drawings, the humor, the sex.
After Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat was his most popular character.
Younger generations caught them after they were collected.
Ballantine Books compiled three Fritz stories in 1969.
3 & 4came out in 1971 andArtisticin 1973.
Belier Press put out all the published inThe Complete Fritz the Catin In 1978.
Crumb is one of the most influential comic artists ever and Fritz is his most influential character.
Dez Skinn who wroteComix: The Underground Revolution, said Fritz the Cat inspiredOmaha the Cat Dancer.
We never would have heard fart jokes on Nickelodeon.
Robert Crumb practically invented the DIY print culture for magazines and graphic novels.
They put out their first comic book in 1959 in homemade notebooks.
The first issue was called Cat Life and it recounted the antics of the Crumb family cat, Fred.
The cat was renamed Fritz and rendered anthropomorphic in Robin Hood which they put out in 1960.
By the early 1960s Fritz began to evolve into the cocky, smart-assed character of the published strips.
By 1964 Fritz was a beatnik caricature.
FormerMadeditor Harvey Kurtzman Harvey Kurtzman picked up stories like Hey, Ol Cat!
Question is, how do we print them without going to jail?
Fritz was a feral creature.
The Crumb brothersAnimal Townstrips added Fuzzy the Bunny, Charles alter ego.
Fuzzy the Bunny appeared in the earlyAnimal Townstrips.
He was a college student in Fritz Bugs Out and as a revolutionary in Fritz the No-Good.
Crumb says Fritz wasnt an alter-ego.
He was just fun to draw.
He published underground until Zap Comix issued its firstFritz the Catissue in 1968.
Fritz was no Felix, but he wasnt averse to whatever magic he found in bags.
Crumb dipped into those bags often.
He was influenced by funny animal cartoonist Carl Barks and Walt KellysPogostrip.
Crumb admitted that he was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny.
I just combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes.
Theres an evolution and then a peak period and then a burnout.
Ralph Bakshi majored in cartooning at the High School of Art and Design.
He wrote, directed and produced four shorts before the studio closed in 1967.
Bakshi founded Bakshi Productions with producer Steve Krantz in 1969.
They made commercials for Coca-Cola and produced a series of educational shorts calledMax, the 2000-Year-Old Mousefor Encyclopdia Britannica.
Then he realized how liberating Crumb made the possibilities.
He could redraw the world.
Oh my Goda Jewish pig?, Bakshi giddily toldIGN.
Which was hysterically funny and, I think, greatlike Uncle Remus stuff.
But they didnt play down south, and they had to change two black crows to two Englishmen.
And I always told him that the black crows were funnier.
So it was a slow awakening.
Fritz Makes His Movie
Bakshi dug Crumbs work a lot.
He identified with the artist, calling him a genius.
A doubtful Crumb loaned Bakshi one of his sketchbooks as a reference to egg him on.
Crumb was not enthusiastic about the project.
Warner Bros. agreed to lay out the bread and distribute the film in the spring of 1970.
Bakshi didnt agree, saying Bullshit, I just made it.
Warner executives wanted to cast celebrity voices and insisted that Bakshi toned down the sexual content toned down.
By the time production onFritz the Catfinished, Cinemation had released Melvin Van PeeblesSweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song.
The reformed Terrytooner wantedFritz the Catto be the anti-Walt Disney.
He also skewered the Pink Elephants on Parade scene fromDumbo.
The background in the Washington Square Park scene is a watercolor painting that was traced off of a photograph.
The effect does more than make it realistic, it brings it to life.
it’s possible for you to almost see the cels breathe.
One animator refused to draw a black crow shooting a pig cop.
Bakshi timed the animation by flipping the drawings in his hand until they matched the screen.
Bakshis attention to detail and his realistic consistency is impressive.
He doesnt shoot until he sees the reds of the eyes.
The animators make it very clear that the crows smoke marijuana rather than tobacco.
it’s possible for you to almost catch a verdant whiff and maybe even envision a contact lens high.
Cats or crows, rabbits or pigs, all the animals shuffle to their own rhythm.
Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin composed the score.
This cool cat was born of a sociopolitical consciousness and free love.
Ralph Bakshi narrates the film and plays Pig Cop #1.Fritz the Catfeatures Rosetta LeNoire as Big Bertha.
John McCurry voices Duke in the pic.
Judy Engles voices Winston Schwartz and the Lizard Leader.
Phil Seuling plays Pig Cop #2.
Mary Dean does an uncredited turn as Harriet and the other two hippie chicks.
Charles Spidar plays Bar Patron in the Crow Bar.
But the best players werent professionals.
Bakshi brought realism by recording almost all of the dialogue on Manhattan streets.
He paid two construction workers fifty bucks each to record them as they drank Scotch.
The voices of the praying rabbis in the synagogue were a documentary recording of his father and uncles.
Bakshi also brought a tape recorder when he got drunk and asked questions in Harlem bar.
Directed by Lina Wertmuller, Giancarlo Gianninis Mimi stumbles upon the revolution, but gets corrupted.
Richard Pryor would perform a tour de force in his 1977 remakeWhich Way Is Up?.
Fritz doesnt get corrupted in the film.
In Crumbs comic, Fritz becomes a self-indulgent superstar engorged with the self-importance of his own fame.
See, Fritz was never supposed to be cute.
He was riddled with anxiety, hypocrisy, gluttony and obsessed with sex.
Hes a fake, a kitty charlatan, a whiskered face of the counterculture, without his peers principles.
The underground sells out to the corporation, much like the radical army in Paddy ChayefskysNetwork.
Pryor told Mr. Man he could shoot him in the ass and walked away like a nervous Pink Panther.
Fritzs arc starts when he is an idealistic college student sharing the drugs and free love.
The feral creature is as self-centered, amoral, unethical, and hedonistic as Morris was finicky.
Reviewers called Fritz a mix of Charlie Chaplin, Candide, and Don Quixote.
Fritz made his first public appearance in the January 1965 strip Fritz Comes on Strong.
Fritz brings a sexy young female cat home, they get naked and he picks fleas off her.
Fritz Bugs Out was serialized inCavalierfrom February to October 1968.
Fritz drops out of college to become a hippie poet.
Fritz Bugs Out was the first time Crumb used anthropomorphic crows to make racial commentary.
Fritz is a hypocrite and the crows are hip innocents.
The word was almost hip.
But dont tell the judge.
She comes back in Fritz the No-Good, the story where Fritz gets involved with revolutionary terrorist.
The former hippie college student rapes one of the revolutionaries girlfriends.
Fritz the Cat, Secret Agent for the C.I.A.
was provoked by James Bond.
Whats the story, Fritz?
Plot-wise, the first part ofFritz The Catcomes from a 1968 story that ran inHead Comix.
The last part comes from Fritz the No-Good, which was in theCavaliers September/October 1968 issue.
Fritz lives in an anthropomorphic alternative New York super-city of animals.
Crows are stand-ins for blacks.
The proletariat know they are the proletariat.
All cops are pigs, but not all pigs are cops.
We learn the proper procedures for dealing with the public.
On three you yell initiate the fucking door.
Now, youve got to use the word fucking because it makes you sound tough.
You could see Porky the Pig reacting exactly the same way.
But pigs is pigs and they automatically revert to form and react the way their training taught them.
They wail on everyone but the rubber duckie with their night sticks.
A crow named Duke is offed in the collateral damage.
Fritz splits in his girlfriend Winston Schwartzs VW Beetle.
Fritz lives through the explosion, which isnt fair because Duke already proved you could die inFritz the Cat.
But cats have nine lives and Fritz signs up for some sexual healing in a Los Angeles hospital room.
Bakshi intended to end the film with Fritzs death but Krantz wouldnt let him.
Fritz the No-Good Cavalier Cat didnt grow a conscience.
Fritz was radicalized and seduced, like Mimi.
Comic book Fritz wouldnt give a shit.
The movie didnt neuter the cat, but pulled back some of the wildlife.
Many people believedFritz the Catwas a pornographic film.
We almost didnt deliver the picture, because of the exploitation of it, Bakshi said at the time.
Krantz appealed the X rating, arguing animals having sex isnt pornography.
The MPAA refused to hear the appeal.
Audiences came like lemmings to a mountain ridge.
They forget its animation.
They treat it like a film, Bakshi said at a preview screening in Los Angeles.
This is the real thing, to get people to take animation seriously.
Now they do as much onThe Simpsonsas I got an X rating forFritz the Cat, Bakshi said later.
The film made a lot of money.
But at the time, money talked.
Other cartoons jumped on the bandwagon.
Suddenly everybody wanted to be drawn with an X.
The subtitled version of the French-Belgian animated filmTarzoon: Shame of the Junglewas released with an X rating.
The reviews were mixed but most critics dug it.
Some predicted it should change the face of the animated cartoons.
Vincent Canby ofThe New York Timessaid it had something to offend just about everyone.
We interrupt the Israeli-Arab war for this special announcement.
Crumb didnt like that sex attitude in it very much.
Its like real repressed horniness; hes kind of letting it out compulsively.
Although San Francisco copyright lawyer Albert L. Morse reportedly said an agreement was reached but no suit was filed.
Agreement or not, Crumbs name is still on the final film.
Cartoonist Vaughn Bode warned Bakshi that Crumb was slick.
After the movie, Bashki called Crumb one of the slickest hustlers youll ever see in your life.
R. Crumb hated it so much he killed Fritz the Cat.
He killed him for good and all inFritz the Cat Superstar, which was published inThe Peoples Comicsin 1972.
I eventually killed Fritz off in 1972, after the animated film came out, Crumb toldThe Paris Review.
The film was terrible.
I didnt want this character to exist anymore in the world.
It affected me very strongly.
It inspired me to be even more personal, to be autobiographical.
Crumb set out to make Fritz so unappealing that he could no longer be commercially viable.
Fritz becomes a sex criminal.
The strip ends with a full page shot of Crumbland where all of Crumbs countercultural icons have been commercialized.
Steve Krantz produced the R-rated sequelThe Nine Lives of Fritz the Catin 1974 without Bakshi or Crumb.
It was directed by Robert Taylor.
Skip Hinnant reprised his role, but Fritz the Cat was married with a chronic jerkoff kid named Ralphie.
The family is on welfare.
Desperately trying to love and be loved.
Terry Zwigoff finally got around to finishing the documentary he started on Crumb in the mid-eighties, in 1994.
James Ubaniak played Crumb in the 2003 movieAmerican Splendor.
Crumb put out his unabridged graphic novelThe Book of Genesisin 2009.
Crumb has kept himself out of further trouble with his music.
This article originally ran in August of 2016.
