Tickled Pink

Q: What do the Pink Panther and hardbop trumpeter Lee Morgan have in common?

A: Both had first names uncommonly suited to brazen punnery.

At the crotchety old age of 34 cartoons aren’t really my bag these days. They’re more of a memory trigger along with the smell of sugared cereals and the undiminished pleasure of sleeping in on Saturday mornings. Still, there are a handful of animated sets that checker my DVD shelf, among them: Spider-Man: The ’67 Collection; Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Vol. 1; Jonny Quest: The Complete First Season; The Ren & Stimpy Show: The First and Second Seasons and a bootleg collection of The Tick.

The recent re-release of the MGM Pink Panther cartoons made me take pause once again in the DVD aisle and decide to part with a small wad of Washingtons. For the Panther fanatic there’s a lavish 5-disc collection in a plush clamshell box that gathers all 124 cartoons (over 14 hours) produced by the studio between 1964 and 1980. Consumers with less completist impulses can console themselves with single-disc editions that duplicate the first three volumes of the box and document what are arguably the periods of highest quality for the series.

I went for the first sale-priced single-disc collection which contains 27 cartoons starting with the Panther’s 1964 Oscar-winning debut The Pink Phink and concluding with Pink Posies from April of ’67- that’s just under three hours of Panther-packed fun. Animators Friz Freleng and David H. DePatie were definitely onto something with the style and look of the shorts. The Panther is portrayed as an archetype of Bohemian cool: lackadaisical, inquisitive and mischievous. His array of adversaries initially draws from a pool of egg-shaped, mustachioed men with minimal features, muted speech and fates similar to the luckless Coyote of Looney Tunes fame (another Freleng-fronted venture). It’s telling too how they usually resort to the Elmer Fudd route of reaching for a shotgun as a means of dispatching the Panther.

The situations regularly dip into the realms of the surreal and usually revolve around a central conceit. In the debut short the Panther matches wits with a hapless house painter, the latter’s bucket of blue pigment immediately piquing the Panther’s puckish side. So begins a skirmish of colors with the painter brushing over a surface only to have his efforts answered and erased by the Panther’s own ever-encroaching swathes of fuchsia. The backdrops are deliciously minimalist, a line-drawn door here, barely sketched floorboards there. Protagonist and antagonist (it’s not always clear which is which) move through the surrealist environments, plucking paint cans out of thin air and later witnessing a field of pink flowers sprout from the fertilizer of buried pink paint. In the end the Panther triumphs, the whole world now glossed in a patina of pink. He hits the painter with a parting coup de grace, smearing pink pigment over his entire person and inciting an avalanche of chagrin.

Also central to the cool-as-cucumbers vibe of cartoons is the music. Henry Mancini’s slinky, tenor sax-centered theme undergoes dozens of variations over the course of the set and it’s hard to get tired of Plas Johnson’s lusty phrasings in the front man slot. Dialogue is almost entirely absent so it’s left to musical cues to embellish and propel the visual action. In today’s post Hana-Barbera world many of the gags (and there are many to choose from) seem clichéd, but in the 60s when these cartoons were created a large number of the jokes were freshly minted. And back to those afore-mentioned puns, there are some doozies including: Reel Pink; Vitamin Pink; Pink-A-Boo and Pinknic.

I’ve only had time to screen the first dozen or so shorts, but I’ve already encountered much to charm and beguile within that number. Seems to me that these shorts are still perfect fare for kids, though I’d be interested to see if the average 8 or 9-year old shares my sentiments. With the Panther back in circulation it’s high time for the suits at MGM to turn their attentions to refurbishing the cache of Ant and Aardvark and Inspector cartoons that lie languishing in the vaults. As fun as the Panther shorts are these two titles are also on par, at least if memory is a reliable meter.