Word: cat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT...
...exhibit now under consideration represents something of a curiosity: a rip-off of a ripoff. It will be remembered that the original cartoon feature Fritz the Cat - largely the work of the animator Ralph Bakshi - so enraged Fritz's creator, the underground comic artist R. Crumb, that he disowned the whole movie. Crumb, a stringent satirist, had conjured up Fritz as a way to mock the poses of the pseudo hipster and to lay waste the giddy excess of the culture from which he sprang. Bakshi slicked Fritz up, cooled him out, and turned him into the perfect creature...
Last week Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz suggested facetiously that the U.S. might save food by killing half of its dogs and cats. Said Butz in a speech to the American Society of Animal Science: "If some of those ill-informed, fuzzy-thinking do-gooders who suggest that we eat one less hamburger per week to release more foodstuffs to the world are really serious ... they could make the first onslaught on this noble goal by reducing our dog and cat population by 50%." Of course, Butz added, "I do not advocate such a thing...
...scene in the play, and one of the most powerful in modern drama. Williams is often at his most effective when he is autobiographical. Tom and Laura in Menagerie were modeled on the playwright and his introverted sister Rose, who had to be institutionalized for life. The confrontation in Cat was his way of trying to exorcise the demonic memory of his taunting and bullying father--much as O'Neill did in a still greater play, Long Day's Journey Into Night...
...Cat, it was the third act that proved troublesome. In order to assure the play's production, Williams felt compelled to knuckle under to director Elia Kazan's desires that Big Daddy return on-stage in the last act, that Brick undergo a change of character as a result of Act II, and that Maggie become more sympathetic. Williams saw some merit only in the last, but went along with all three. In Kazan's production, Big Daddy came back to hear Maggie's false claim of pregnancy and to tell a smutty joke. This was a half-hearted compliance...