"It sounds like a bunch of degenerates in there..."

November 15, 2022 7:55 PM

[NSFW] "...[L]ife to me was very dangerous and people were not to be trusted; truth to power is very important. My films are still playing to people, because people haven't changed – as a matter of fact, they've gotten worse." BBC Culture looks back with Ralph Bakshi and others at "Fritz the Cat at 50: The X-rated cartoon that shocked the US". Here's the full movie on the Internet Archive. | Wikipedia — Fritz the Cat & Ralph Bakshi |
posted by not_on_display (19 comments total)

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas did a deep dive on Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings movie a while back that discussed Fritz and related works as well.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 10:35 PM on November 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Has no one done a deep-dive on the D&D inspired Fire & Ice though?
posted by revmitcz at 1:31 AM on November 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

I'm a fan of Cool World, which I believe leaves me in select (and suspect) company. Liked Fritz too, mainly because I was in my early teens when I saw it and I definitely wasn't supposed to see it.
posted by chavenet at 3:51 AM on November 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

Old enough to have seen it in a theater. “They’re smoking reefers like mad at May’s pad” became a meme among my crowd of ne’er do wells.
posted by aiq at 6:07 AM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

As a 35 year old, I had never heard of Fritz until about a year ago, it was on kanopy or one of the other video streaming services. I watched the first few minutes of it: its content reminded me a lot of the 'edgy', crass, hedonist, un-PC animation/short movies made in flash that you'd see on newgrounds or fark in the early 00s; or South Park.

I imagine at the time of its release, an animated movie that looks professionally done featuring a swearing cat acting like a complete hedonist and self-centered asshole, was very novel and previous confined to the imaginations of people and opened the doors to things like South Park, Team America, etc.
posted by fizzix at 6:30 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wizards was (and is) pretty cool.
posted by Splunge at 6:32 AM on November 16, 2022 [14 favorites]

Thanks for the reminder that the Internet Archive exists.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 6:52 AM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

The BBC article says "Critics called it debased and pornographic," and links to this NYT pan. But the review, by Lee Beaupre, was nothing of the sort.. Rather, it is a thoughtful piece that defends the social ideals of the '60s. Beaupre writes, for instance, that the movie implies that "all the rhetoric and outrage and introspection of the sixties were just an elaborate camouflage for lechery."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:00 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

In terms of the content of Fritz the Cat, i.e. underground comix in general and Robert Crumb in particular, we recently had this thread, which is still open. WRT Bakshi in general, the video that Dan Olson did (and Proofs and Refutations linked to above) is good in terms of putting Bakshi's career in some sort of context. My general feelings toward Bakshi are colored by a few things:

- having seen his Lord of the Rings adaptation way back when it was released; I remembered it as mostly being pretty decent, up until Helm's Deep, at which time it turns into a muddled rotoscoped mess. (Since then, I think that Bakshi or at least one of his fans has complained mightily about Peter Jackson using some of his scene composition for Jackson's own LotR adaptation; aside from the nonsense of claiming that when, you know, they're both adapting the same material, and therefore one might expect some similarities when portraying the exact same scene, I can say that Jackson's adaptation helped open up the books for me in a way that Bakshi's didn't come close to doing. Also, as TFA makes clear, Bakshi got the rights to Fritz the Cat from Crumb by getting his wife to sign it away.) Again, Olson's video does a bang-up job of talking about this.

- I might watch Wizards some time if it were available for free.

- I would actively avoid Cool World because the trailer for it was appended to the beginning of the VHS tape for Star Trek VI, the first Star Trek video that I actually owned, and I got really tired of having to fast-forward through the damn thing every time I wanted to watch the Cold-War-in-space epic. The sole message of the trailer seemed to be, "Wouldn't it be great to have sex with a comics character? Especially one that you made up yourself?" I mean, yeah, but that doesn't mean that I want to watch a full-length movie of someone else getting it on with their waifu.

- It doesn't help Bakshi's case that one of his biggest fans, and former employee, was animator and serial abuser John Kricfalusi.

- So I'm not particularly interested in watching Fritz the Cat. The bits and pieces that I've seen of it do look technically interesting and I'm sure that it really stuck it to the squares back in the day, but it just doesn't seem that compelling now.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:18 AM on November 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

I have not seen all of Ralph's films but I have seen a bunch of them and Wizards is probably the most coherent.

I sort of wish that just once, Ralph had gotten enough budget to be able to take his improvisational, jazzy approach to movie-making and actually edit something good out of all that seat-of-the-pants work. He never really knows where he's going when he starts a film and only begins to figure it out once he's close to done, and then he has this immense pile of straight-ahead animation that he spent his entire budget on that he can't leave on the cutting room floor. They're all interesting failures that you kinda want to give credit for having ambitions nobody else in animation dared explore at the time but he never really succeeded at them.

He was kicking around some ideas for Wizards 2 (as well as an adaptation of On The Road, some kind of noir project, and a bunch of other stuff) when he was hanging around John K's studio after starring as himself in "Firedogs 2". The whole gag in there with Ren and Stimpy having to drive off a giant poo from a clogged toilet was based on things he actually made his subordinates do, the old Spumco crew had a *lot* of stories about working under him on Mighty Mouse. Mostly they involved him doing crazy shit while flying high on cocaine; supposedly his wife extracted very dire promises for him to not touch that stuff if he was gonna go make another go at Hollywood again. If he'd gotten a decent budget and kept that promise then we might have finally seen Ralph manage to make a film that delivered on its promise, but he did not get that chance, and went back to Arizona to paint and be retired.

(I worked at Spumco during the internet/R&S Adult Party era, and yes, Halloween Jack's link about that time is 100% true.)

(also now that I think about it I'm not sure I've ever seen Fritz, and really don't have much desire to watch anything based on Crumb's work even if Crumb hated it so much he killed off Fritz after it came out.)
posted by egypturnash at 8:09 AM on November 16, 2022 [9 favorites]

Bakshi always reminds me of Harlan Ellison. As with Ellison, it seems like he came of age in the middle of a genre's so-called "golden age" having picked up all the best skills and worst behaviors of those around him and he's never had enough introspection to realize that maybe he's the asshole.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:17 AM on November 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

Wizards was (and is) pretty cool.

I loved Wizards, but I was always disappointed that the good magic wizard ended up using technology to kill the bad technology wizard.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:28 AM on November 16, 2022

I sort of wish that just once, Ralph had gotten enough budget to be able to take his improvisational, jazzy approach to movie-making and actually edit something good out of all that seat-of-the-pants work.

Have you seen American Pop? Has anyone?
posted by The Bellman at 9:13 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Reign of Fire" was posted to FanFare recently and I draw strong parallels with timing.. Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" effort for kid-me was positively luminous.. a thrilling revelation.. and I just slowly aged out of appreciating his work from there. I find technical aspects compelling but so much of what we enjoy and love for any reason is so contingent on being ready for it. Too soon, too late, and it's just not happening.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:20 AM on November 16, 2022

Have you seen American Pop? Has anyone?

I think I have? I went through a Bakshi phase a long time ago. I think the Harlan Ellison comparison is very apt.
posted by jessamyn at 9:48 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Have you seen American Pop? Has anyone?

Saw it first run in the theater with my dad.
posted by octothorpe at 4:02 PM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

American Pop on the Internet Archive (reminder: the IA still exists)
posted by not_on_display at 4:35 PM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Have you seen American Pop? Has anyone?

I saw it first run in a theater with a couple friends from high school. I recall loving it until it betrayed us by not giving us a proper Punk/New Wave song at the end.
posted by Devoidoid at 9:55 AM on November 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey! The guy who voiced Fritz in the movie, I just figured out that was the same actor who played "Fargo North, Decoder" on Electric Company (the PBS kids show from the mid 1970s)! I knew the voice sounded familiar.
posted by not_on_display at 10:34 AM on November 17, 2022