Retro Saturday Morning: Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse (1960)(Trans-Artists)

January 16, 2021

While searching through Tubi this week my wife was very happy discover that the streaming service had one of the favorite cartoons of her childhood Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse. We sat down one evening and watched several episodes. I had never seen the cartoon before and after watching it one burning question was on the forefront of my mind:

"How does this cartoon still exist?"

I know that sounds like a strange question so let me explain. The first thing that should jump out at you is the simple fact that Courageous Cat's sidekick Minute Mouse is a blatant copy of Mickey Mouse. He looks like Mickey and sounds like Mickey, which leads one to wonder how, with all the lawyers Disney has sitting around foaming at the mouth, somebody didn't get their butts sued off?

Heck, Disney even ripped of the Japanese animated series Kimba The White Lion and turned it into the Lion King then sued the Japanese production company.

If that wasn't bad enough, just about every other character in Courageous Cat is a rip off of another famous cartoon icon even Bugs Bunny.

The title characters in the series sprung from the mind of famous comic book scribe Bob Kane who created them as a parody of his famous dynamic duo Batman and Robin. This spoof is well conceived down to the minute detail. A great example being Courageous Cat's preferred mode of transportation, the Cat Mobile, which is an almost exact copy of the silver age comic book version of the Bat Mobile. Courageous, of course, has a secret lair known as the Cat Cave rather than Bat Cave and so on.

Oh and before I forget, the theme song sounds an awful lot like the theme to the 1958 crime series Peter Gunn.

Courageous Cat is the protector of Empire City. Whenever fighting bad guys, Courageous Cat would use his all-purpose Cat Gun or a vast variety of different deus ex machina "trick guns" he pulls out of his cape that (like the Green Arrow's trick arrows) fire whatever the situation requires like a rope, some water, a parachute, cages, boxing gloves, lightning-like magnetic rays, or even more bizarre ammunition, and even the occasional actual bullet. In case of emergency, Courageous also has extra pre-James Bond secret gadgets hidden in his belt buckle and the star emblem on his chest.

In the animated series, the pair are anthropomorphic animal superheroes without known secret identities (the green-eyed caped crimefighter and his squeaky-voiced companion are usually addressed as simply "Courageous" and "Minute") who live in the Cat Cave. When summoned via the Cat Signal over their television set, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse race to the scene of the crime in their sleekly feline red Cat Mobile which can convert into both the extendable-winged Cat Plane and submersible Cat Boat and thwart the criminal plots of various villains who threaten Empire City.

Though they fought many miscreants, the duo's recurring arch-enemy was Chauncey "Flat-Face" Frog who appeared in nearly every episode.

The five-minute length of the cartoons made the series suitable for use as interstitials or airtime fillers, especially to accommodate a movie or show that ended at an unusually early time, as well as animated content for local children's shows.