Fritz the Cat
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Wikipedia-Article "Fritz the Cat"
Fritz the Cat is a comic book fictional character created by Robert Crumb during the height of the underground comics movement of the 1960s.
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Publication history
Fritz the Cat was the first character Crumb created, a kind of updated Felix with overtones of Charlie Chaplin, Candide and Don Quixote. Fritz was originally created as part of a series of comic books that R. Crumb and his brother Charles drew when they were kids. In the earliest stages of the character's form, Fritz was just a normal house-cat, later developing into a more humanesque character as Crumb grew up, and finally into the character's final form as the tomcat we all know and love during Crumb's teen-age years.
Crumb occasionally injected elements of his own biography and sexual misadventures into the strips. The character's first published story appeared in Help! #22 (January 1965). The story was called Fritz Comes on Strong. In it, Fritz brings a young girl home, and strips all of her clothes off before getting on top of her to pick fleas off her. While Harvey Kurtzman agreed to publish the comic, he told Crumb that he didn't know how he was going to "publish it without getting arrested."
Fritz the Cat's adventures were published in magazines and comic books such as Cavalier, Fug, and The People's Comics throughout the years. He acquired his own title in 1969.
Characters
Fritz is a trouble-making, anti-establishment, college-age figure whose adventures consisted of having sex with as many anthropomorphic female animals as possible, while staying one step ahead of the law. In one of his stories, Crumb describes Fritz as "a sophisticated, up-to-the-minute young feline college student who lives in a modern 'supercity' of millions of animals...yes, not unlike people in their manners and morals....." [1]
Reoccurring characters include Fritz's canine girlfriend: the ever-oppressive Winston, the city's piggish cops, negro crows, and Fritz's college buddies, Fuzzy the Bunny (also a former character from the comics Crumb drew as a kid) and Heinz the Swine.
Other Media
The popularity of the character of Fritz the Cat led up-and-coming animation director Ralph Bakshi to make Fritz the star of his first animated feature film.
Released to theaters in 1972, Bakshi's film Fritz the Cat was the first animated feature film to be rated X, something that had been unheard of in movies up until this film.
Robert Crumb has famously stated that he detested Bakshi's film — so much so that he killed off the character of Fritz in his comics, by having an ostrich-woman stab him in the head with an ice pick.
Critics and audiences were generally kinder to the film, however, and it is seen as something of a landmark in the history of animated films, as it was one of the first attempts to produce an animated film intended especially for adults.
An animated sequel to the movie was released in 1974, entitled The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (which, unintentionally, was somewhat of an answer to Robert Crumb having killed the character off in the last comic book). The sequel had nothing to do with Bakshi or Crumb, and it faded away quickly at the box office. The sequel was directed by Robert Taylor, and written by Taylor, Fred Halliday, and Eric Monte. In both films, Fritz was voiced by Skip Hinnant.
The success of Fritz the Cat also led to a brief fad within the adult film industry of producing pornographic animated short films, or inserting animated sequences into their live-action films, and releasing them to adult movie theaters with the slogan "X-rated and animated!"