Release Date:

April 23, 1949

Main Character(s):

Hubie and Bertie, Claude Cat

Summary:

Hubie and Bertie are about to move into a new home, but find that it’s inhabited by champion mouser Claude Cat. Deciding to get the sleeping Claude out, they pull various pranks on him to make it look like Claude is going insane.

That’s Not All, Folks:

The production number is 1076 and was released as a Looney Tune.

The cartoon was given a Blue Ribbon reissue.

This is the first appearance of the neurotic feline Claude Cat, who would also appear as Hubie and Bertie’s nemesis in their final two cartoons, “The Hypo-Chondri-Cat” (1950) and “Cheese Chasers” (1951) as well as their sole appearance in Looney Tunes Cartoons, “Frame the Feline” (2021). Claude also appeared in a few cartoons without them up until 1954.

The Internet likes to say that various cat characters from earlier Jones cartoons (“The Aristo-Cat”, “Fin N Catty”, “Angel Puss”, “Odor-Able Kitty”, “Trap Happy Porky”, and “Roughly Squeaking”) as well as later cartoons (1958’s “Cat Feud” and 1962’s “Louvre Come Back to Me”) are all Claude, but the designs are very different and none of them have yellow fur, so clearly NONE of them are Claude (this is a good example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet regarding Looney Tunes. This blog of course is an exception as while the opinions stated in each post are solely my own, everything else is factual).

According to animation historian Greg Ford’s commentary for this cartoon on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 DVD set in 2004, the cartoon originally ended with Claude trying to get back into the house through the chimney only to get set on fire from the one Hubie and Bertie lit and shoot out in pain. This ending was obviously cut before release, hence the abrupt fade-out of Hubie and Bertie toasting cheese in front of the fireplace.

The title is a pun for “house wrecker”, which refers to one’s affair with a married person resulting in a breakup of that marriage.

The cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award.

The cartoon’s plot would be reused for McKimson’s “Gopher Broke” (1958) with a few differences. It involves the Goofy Gophers attempting to get “their” vegetables back from the barn, which is guarded by Barnyard Dawg. The pranks are also different and most of Dawg’s mishaps are witnessed by a deadpan pig. In this cartoon, however, no one is in the house to witness Claude becoming victim to each prank.

Jones reused this cartoon’s plot himself when he and his unit were at MGM in the mid-1960’s making all-new Tom and Jerry cartoons. The specific cartoon that uses this cartoon’s plot is “The Year of the Mouse” (1965) but is more sadistic as Jerry and an unnamed gray mouse’s pranks involve them making Tom believe he’s trying to kill himself in his sleep. While the gags are original, the sadistic tone of them definitely makes the ending (where Tom eventually finds them out and holds them captive while he sleeps in peace) very satisfying.

A clip from this cartoon can be seen in the 1983 film “Twilight Zone: The Movie”.

This is one of the first non-Freleng cartoons to have someone’s name in the background. In this case, Ken Harris’ last name is seen on a bottle of hair tonic while (presumably) Robert Gribbroek’s name is seen on a jar of talcum powder.

What I Like About This One:

Hubie calls Bertie over with the usual “Hey, Bert. Come here” and shows him their new home, but slaps Bertie around as he attempts to open the window to enter. Bertie asks, “What did I do? What did I do?” Hubie tells him while slapping him around again, “You didn’t do nothin’! You didn’t do nothin’! LOOK!” He points to Claude’s certificates and trophies of him being a champion mouser before the camera pans down to Claude himself sleeping. Hubie decides, “Let’s see now, uh, this is gonna require stragety. The thing we gotta do is we gotta get that cat out of the house”. He starts to talk into Bertie’s ear, “Now here’s what you should do, Bert” and whispers it with Bertie laughing, “Riot!” over the plan (animated by Ben Washam).

Each plan involves Bertie being lowered down by a fishing pole and being pulled up by Hubie before Claude can see him. The first prank is just Bertie hitting Claude with a plank, to which a confused Claude just shrugs and goes back to sleep (animated by Lloyd Vaughan).

Bertie sticks a bellows in Claude’s mouth to pump him full of air, causing Claude to fly around the room once Bertie is pulled up. After this experience, Claude gets a ladder to go up to a chandelier where he has hidden a bottle of “Cat Nip”. He throws it out the window and recites the oath of sobriety (animated by Vaughan).

Hubie then lowers a sleeping bulldog inside his doghouse down with Bertie. Bertie pulls the slightly awake bulldog’s lower lip back which sends said lower lip smacking the bulldog in the face when Bertie is pulled back up. This causes the bulldog to wake up in rage, and seeing only Claude in front of him, assumes he was responsible, and lets out an angry “Why, you-” before snarling and beating him up. In the midst of the fight, the bulldog grabs a club (which looks more like a log) to beat Claude with. Claude runs to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and pours a teaspoon of nerve tonic while shaking (animated by Washam).

Before Claude comes back, Bertie slips a dynamite stick inside Claude’s pillow. When Claude comes back onto the pillow, it explodes, covering him in the pillow’s feathers. Claude runs back to the bathroom, where the feathers come off of him. This time, he drinks the nerve tonic from the bottle (animated by Ken Harris).

Bertie next puts a rope through a stack of dishes on a table, out the window, through the drainpipe, down a ladder, and back into another window before tying the rope to Claude’s tail. He tugs on the rope as a “ready” gesture. Hubie pushes a large rock, which the other end of the rope is tied to, off the chimney. This sends Claude out the window, up the ladder, through the drainpipe, through the other window, through the stack of dishes, and finally crashing into a large steel plate that Bertie holds out, flattening him. When Claude gets up, he does the “running finger across lips” bit (animated by Vaughan).

After reading a chapter on nightmares in Sigmund Fried’s “Psychology of Dreams”, Claude chuckles off the idea of nightmares where upon waking up one “should endeavor to convince himself that it was only a dream, that it never really happened”, with the last three words underlined. Once Claude goes back to sleep, both Hubie and Bertie come down and put earmuffs over his ears so he can’t hear them working on their final scheme: turning the living room upside down by painting the green floor white and the white ceiling green, and using numerous nails and iron glue to make all the stuff on the floor stick to the ceiling, and all of the stuff on the ceiling onto the floor as well as hang a picture on the wall upside down. Once they’re finished and go back up the chimney with the supplies, Bertie laughs very hard over how the following scene is about to play out (animated by Phil Monroe).

Claude wakes up once the earmuffs are pulled off of him, and upon finding himself on the “ceiling”, clings to the chandelier while shaking in fright, and attempts to jump down to the “floor”, but falls back on to the “ceiling”. He jumps to the “floor” again, sticking all fours into it. After his lower body and then his upper body dangles in the air for a bit, Claude eventually manages to walk across the “ceiling”. The camera turns upside down while Claude is cautiously walking across on all fours. Reaching a small table, he has to hold on to it, and has to catch his nerve tonic when it floats out before giving up upon seeing said tonic gargling out of the bottle upside down (animated by Harris).

Walking out of the living room, Claude is shocked to see he’s on the same level as a light fixture in another room. Grabbing on to that, he falls with it (animated by Harris) and is surprised to see the farm landscape (actually a painting held up against the window) upside down, a cabin (another painting held up against the window), and fish swimming outside the window (actually a fish tank). With this, Claude runs out of the house screaming and is seen cowering in a tree (animated by Washam).

Meanwhile, Hubie and Bertie laugh over how “that upside down room was the piece de resistance” and slide the rope down the chimney where they toast cheese in front of the fireplace (animated by Washam).

Where Can I Watch It?

At archive.org!

Carrot Rating:

🥕🥕🥕🥕🥕