The Sequel We Didn't Need: Robert Taylor's 1974 The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT 

(Robert Taylor, USA, 1974, 76 minutes)

Director Ralph Bakshi (Heavy Traffic) and producer Steve Krantz (Spider-Man) originally brought R. Crumb's sex-obsessed comic book character Fritz the Cat to life in a 1972 animated picture that became a hit on the grindhouse circuit. Though populated entirely by cute talking animals, the material was aimed strictly at adults. 

While Bakshi set his film in the 1960s, his longtime collaborator, Robert "Bob" Taylor, has set his sequel in the 1970s. Notably, neither Crumb nor Bakshi were involved with the 1974 film, and it shows. Fritz (voiced again by The Electric Company's Skip Hinnant) remains a blue-hued tabby in a red sweater, but he's added a military-style jacket to his pants-free ensemble. 

In his younger days, Fritz was a naïve stoner trying to make it with co-eds and mucking about in leftist causes; now he's an unemployed stoner with a loudly nagging (and visibly braless) old lady and their onanistic toddler. Fritz once fancied himself a writer and a poet, but those dreams died after he dropped out of college. Worse yet, he's become an adulterer and a homophobe. 

In both films, the city features several species, mostly cats and dogs, while Black characters are represented exclusively by crows, a trope Crumb appears to have swiped from Disney's Dumbo, but if Fritz the Cat offered a satire of race relations, Taylor's attempt feels more off-putting than not. 

In one of his nine lives, Fritz travels to New Jersey, now known as New Africa, an all-Black state that has seceded from the union and installed their own Idi Amin-like president. About the state's young ladies, Fritz salaciously observes, "These chicks know where it's at by the time they're 11." 

Though he has arrived to deliver a letter on behalf of President Henry Kissinger, he ends up facing execution for the assassination of the Black president (in the first film, Fritz started a race riot). He escapes by hiding in the sewer, a callback to the time he hid in a toilet from porcine police in the first film. 

In other lives, he's a doomed womanizer, a randy astronaut, and an aid to Adolf Hitler--played as a genitally-impaired, homosexual buffoon who would have preferred to become a ballerina. None of this is especially clever or funny, not least the incessant sexism. If objectification was always part of Fritz the Cat's world, it's simply more pernicious this time around. 

The animation, a combination of two-dimensional figures and watercolor-like backdrops, however, isn't bad and the score from Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, with uncredited vocals from the great soul singer Merry Clayton, adds welcome funk flavor, but Fritz's naïve charm got lost along the way. 

Nonetheless, R. Crumb has always distanced himself from Ralph Bakshi's original film, with which he expressed extreme displeasure (his first wife, Dana Morgan, with whom he shared power of attorney, sold the rights without his express permission). Crumb got his revenge by killing off the character.

According to Michael Barrier in Funnyworld, "In a fifteen-page story, 'Fritz the Cat, Superstar,' Fritz is pictured as a degenerate movie star who meets his end when a spurned female ostrich pierces his skull with an icepick. Before that, though, Fritz interrupts his wenching and boozing long enough for a script conference with some Hollywood hotshots, including two named 'Ralphy' and 'Stevie.' Crumb thus not only gigs Bakshi and Krantz, but lays to rest a character he feels he has outgrown." Considering that the sequel retains even less of his distinctive style and humor, it's unlikely he's a fan. 

As for cowriter Eric Monte, he would go on to bigger and better things when he wrote the semi-autobiographical script for Michael Schultz's Krantz-produced Black comedy Cooley High, the big-screen inspiration behind the ABC sitcom What’s Happening!!, which would appear the following year.

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Images: The Movie Database (Fritz), Retro Junk (his wife and cat), the IMDb (Hitler), and Rotten Tomatoes, where Fritz has a "rotten" score of 33%.