Trivia / The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat

• Creator Backlash: Milton Knight absolutely enjoyed working on the show, but had mixed feelings about it as a whole, feeling the show suffered from a lack of direction and didn't put enough focus on Felix himself, and that the overseas animation was uncertain and sluggish. He also wasn't a fan of the additional dialogue "the studio added [to Felix] after the job ended", primarily his silent-era inspired episodes.
  "Most people involved, in fact, had a seemingly small interest in this incarnation of the character. As always happens, a raft of supporting characters (each appealing to some demographic or other) was conceived before the outlines were even done, and all of them had to get playing time. Felix got lost; he ended up bearing more resemblance to Burt Gillett's Van Beuren Felix or even the Charles Mintz Krazy Kat (benign ciphers both) than Otto Messmer's creation."
  • Averted with some of the show's other directors such as Robin Steele and Stephen Destefano, who loved working on the show during season 1.
  • Despite efforts to shift to script-written episodes in Season 2 in an attempt to "salvage" the show due to the first season's poor ratings and unfocused direction, it had a truly turbulent production and was even more of a ratings disaster than the first season. This got it canceled 8 episodes in and it was seen as a disaster to just about everyone involved.
  • Don Oriolo, then-owner of Felix, was very unhappy with how both seasons turned out and was absolutely furious with how the staff handled the characterization of his dad's characters in the second season, especially the depiction of Professor and Rock Bottom. That season 2 was full of snipes against him and his dad's version of Felix after he forced a lighter retool on it didn't help either. Tellingly, in his own History of Felix video, Twisted Tales is only given a very brief and grudging mention in passing.
  • Felix the Cat Inc. in general became so unhappy with the show that they began to see it as a lost cause and refused to renew the license for Film Roman to continue using Felix while season 2 was still in production, precluding any chance of a third season happening even if it hadn't bombed in ratings.
  • Felix's second season voice actor Charlie Adler considers this series to be his least favorite voice acting job, due to not liking Thom Adcox Hernandez being replaced and feeling he was miscast as his replacement. He also recalled it as a dreadful experience because he got wrapped up in the rest of the show's turbulent production troubles and, as with many of the other staffers, he had no idea what kind of show it was supposed to be.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Interestingly averted in the Japanese dub, as this one of the two times when Felix had being voiced by a male voice actor, in this case Ryūsei Nakao.
  • Same for the Italian dub, where Simone Crisari voices Felix.
• Descended Creator: Don Oriolo wrote and performed the theme song.
• Disowned Adaptation: Don Oriolo came to feel this way about the show, feeling that it was just too weird, and he wasn't a fan of how it went out of its way to not be like his dad's Felix cartoons.
• Executive Meddling: Because CBS wanted the show to be aimed at kids, the staff was forced to pull back much of the adult humor. And apparently, a big reason for the season 2 retool was that Don Oriolo wasn't too happy with the first season and wanted to put his dad's characters in the show, hoping to "save it". All of the new supporting characters, Peeking Duck, Fats Holler, Candy, etc. were ordered to be scrapped and characters from the Joe Oriolo era were brought back on his orders (though Don eventually relented and allowed a few of the first season's recurring cast such as Roscoe and Sheba to stick around). Years later, Don Oriolo rationalized that what he was doing was an attempt at damage control on the show due to the many hands in the first season giving it an unfocused direction that took too much of the limelight away from Felix himself.
• Franchise Killer: Along with the commercial failure of Felix the Cat: The Movie, the poor ratings of this show and its abrupt cancellation led to the Felix the Cat cartoons getting put on ice yet again. Only low-key revivals of the show came out in the years after, including Baby Felix and the direct-to-DVD film Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, before the franchise fell off the radar altogether until Felix got new graphic novel released in 2023.
• God Never Said That: Formerly on this very page, Milton Knight was once stated to have "disliked" Thom Adcox Hernandez's Felix performance in the episodes Knight worked on, which were intentionally directed to feel like the silent-era Felix cartoons. However, Knight has clarified that his disdain was only about the superfluous amounts of dialogue added to his episodes, and not Hernandez's Felix himself, who he actually enjoyed.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The show is almost impossible to find on home video, getting only a handful of rare VHS releases, one rare DVD release in the US (containing only the first four episodes) and a few in China and Germany. The fact that Don Oriolo hated both seasons and virtually everyone involved in the show hated working on season 2, combined with the show being jointly owned by Waterman Entertainment, which in turn owns the library of Film Roman, and DreamWorks Classics/NBCUniversal (who got the show after acquiring the rights to the character in 2014), has only added to the difficulty.
  • Felix the Cat Productions stated in 2011 (before they sold the franchise to DreamWorks) that this series and Baby Felix and Friends would be available to purchase on iTunes, but negotiations seemingly broke down and the series were never added on the service.
  • A release would finally see the light of day in July of 2020, when the entire series, along with Baby Felix, was made available to stream on NBCUni's Peacock upon launch.
• The Other Darrin: Felix had two voice actors in this series: Thom Adcox Hernandez in season 1, and Charlie Adler in season 2.
• Saved from Development Hell: A Felix the Cat series was in the planning stages for six (technically ten) years with the Felix the Cat: The Movie acting as a pilot.
• Screwed by the Network: Part of the reason the show tanked so hard in ratings was because it was plopped in very poor time slots: half the time Twisted Tales was completely bumped by sports shows, making it very difficult to establish regular viewers. To make matters worse, the show was also plopped directly opposite to X-Men: The Animated Series, which was a huge ratings hit at the time.
• Short Run in Peru: The series premiered in the UK over a week before it did in its native US.
• Troubled Production: Milton Knight, an animator and director on the series, claimed that the production for the show was fun, but not exactly ideal. Other staffers have pitched in on the internet over time that the show's production was rather turbulent due to a variety of factors. Charlie Adler likewise said at an Anthrocon appearance that the production of the show's second season was a nightmare for everyone involved.
  • One of the biggest problems during production was a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen; the staff simply couldn't make up their minds on what kind of cartoon this series was supposed to be. Studio head Phil Roman was most comfortable with the plot-and-dialogue-driven approach used in his commercial successes Garfield and Friends and The Simpsons, and had given this series what seemed like a guarded blessing, but then there was one group who wanted a Felix like the Otto Messmer shorts, one group who wanted Max Fleischer surrealism, Don Oriolo, the current owner of Felix, wanting it to be like his dad's made-for-TV Felix cartoons (which most of the staff working on the show was against; they ultimately, but begrudgingly, added certain elements from it into Twisted Tales, like the Magic Bag), one group who wanted the show to be Ren & Stimpy-esque (understandable, since some of the artists on the show were former Ren & Stimpy artists), and one director who wanted a Robert Crumb influence! The end result of this gave the show a very helter-skelter direction in tone and content, with Felix himself often getting swamped in importance by a large cast of supporting characters and his chaotic world.
  • On top of that, per word of Mark Evanier, the studio had a terrible time finding a voice for Felix, saying they may have set a new industry record for most actors auditioned for one role (to where even staff of the studio were trying to audition for the role), and they wound up recording the show with a "scratch" (temporary) voice and animating to that. Out of desperation, they settled on casting Thom Adcox Hernandez as a temporary actor for Felix only a few weeks before an episode aired and he dubbed his voice over the animation but intended to recast him after the first season wrapped up. The second season would end up recasting him with Charlie Adler.
  • Another problem was that in addition to having a month to storyboard, design and do layout work on each short, they could not learn from their mistakes because by the time film began to come in, the season had been just about wrapped up. Some directors could handle writing and boarding a good cartoon while some couldn't. The artists had no say on retakes in animation either, which was left to Phil Roman to decide and unfortunately, the overseas animation on the show tended to be rather sluggish. This only got worse with the second season with Korean company Plus One Animation having to rush episodes through, resulting in sloppy artwork and very bad animation timing (with "Nightmare on Oak Street" being one of the worst examples in the second season). On top of that, they were behind schedule so they couldn't order retakes to correct any mistakes.
  • Eventually, Phil Roman and Don Oriolo found the "Cartoonist Driven" approach of the first season to be too taxing on them, and not even worth the trouble since, despite being one of the most expensive shows that Phil Roman's studio had made, the first season turned out to be a flop in ratings, due in part to a terrible time slot: it was usually sandwiched right between sports shows and then-ratings giant X-Men: The Animated Series, making it very hard to establish an audience for the show. On top of that, Don was just unhappy with the weird direction of season 1 having almost nothing in common with Joe Oriolo's Felix, so the second season went through an extensive retool. While the first season was storyboarded while working from a basic outline and was absurdly surreal in its premises and animation, the second season decided to take the series into a direction more in vogue with the Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons and shift production to make the show a more standard TV cartoon, with scripts replacing the all-storyboard approach (usually provided by the writer of Garfield and Friends, Mark Evanier, who has remained silent on the series ever since). This resulted in much more linear plotting and less surreal humor with more emphasis on wordplay and one-liners, as well as bringing back some of the Oriolo-era characters like Poindexter, Master Cylinder, and The Professor while forcing most of the new side characters to be scrapped in turn.
  • This move was met with an outright hostile reception from the show's staff, particularly Timothy Björklund, the producer of the first season, who knew Don's meddling would only make things worse and bailed on the show just two weeks into the second season's production. Evanier attempted to voice direct the actors instead of the directors but after a couple of weeks of trying that, the results were so disastrous that the studio was forced to drop that position and hand over voice direction back to the cartoon directors. And the biggest slap in the face was that the show's budget was reduced to a third of what it originally was, which guaranteed the animation would take a nosedive in quality. The music was another major casualty: the first season had been scored by the Club Foot Orchestra, whose hot jazz soundtracks accurately evoked the classic cartoons the show was paying homage to. Budget cuts forced the show's second season to use cheaper and less fitting synthesizer music.
  • The artists, who were very unhappy about the situation, retaliated by writing whole episodes that took jabs at the second season's toned-down retool, such as "Attack of the Robot Rat" (which infuriated Don Oriolo for being a ruthless parody of his dad's made for TV Felix the Cat cartoons), "Background Details" (which jabs at the show's production), "Phoney Phelix" (a jab at the animation industry at the time... or at least somewhat today. It even jabs at Film Roman, the company that made the show), and "The Fuzzy Bunny Show" (jabbing at the show's ratings and character's popularity). The first few scripts they received were followed closely but Craig Kellman, the show's new producer, finally fought for the artists to have more storytelling and creative control on the show, and they were able to completely scrap the scripts and write their own shows, ironically giving the crew more freedom than they had in the first season. Some episodes were tightly scripted and some were not.
  • Unfortunately for them, CBS' VP of Children's Programming Judy Price, who wanted the show picked up in the first place, got fired and Felix the Cat Inc. was so unhappy with the show in general that they refused to renew the license for Phil Roman to continue using Felix, guaranteeing a third season wouldn't happen. To make matters worse, the second season turned out to be an even bigger flop in the ratings and it ultimately got the show canned with season 2 ending after just 8 episodes. The show's failure ultimately put the Felix the Cat cartoons on ice yet again, with only low-key revivals coming of the series after the fact.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally the Felix the Cat: The Movie acted as a pilot for a potential Felix the Cat cartoon in the early 90s, If the film was successful this show might have been different or not happened at all.
  • Apparently, Professor and Rock Bottom were supposed to make more appearances in season 2 but the show was canceled before that could happen, so their only appearance in it was "Attack of the Robot Rat". On top of that, Don Oriolo was so angry at how the characters were handled in that episode, he gave an order that the redesigns of Professor and Rock Bottom were to be retconned into entirely different characters for future episodes.
  • The show would have had more characters from the Joe Oriolo cartoon appear in the series such as General Clang, Martin the Martian, Vavoom, and Alex the Cat (the comic-strip-only character) in the second season but the idea was scrapped when the series got canceled. The Alex character did make a cameo appearance in the episode "Nightmare on Oak Street" though.
  • Around the time that season 2 aired, the first season's episodes were planned to be re-recorded with Charlie Adler in place of Thom Adcox-Hernandez to keep in continuity (similar to what Cartoon Network did to the title character of Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?).
• Working Title: The Twisted Adventures of Felix the Cat.
• Writer Revolt: Most of the staff openly hated the made-for-TV Felix cartoons made by Joe Oriolo in the late '50s/early '60s, and wanted the show to exclusively follow the roots of the original silent cartoons and abandon the characters and tone of the TV cartoons. Don Oriolo, Joe's son and then-owner of Felix the Cat, insisted that they at least include certain elements from it like the Magic Bag so that the show would have some kind of tie to his dad's work.
  • As mentioned earlier, by the time the second season started production, Phil Roman and Don Oriolo decided to take the series into a direction more in vogue with the Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons and shift production to make the show a more standard TV cartoon as well as bringing back some of the Oriolo era characters while scrapping most of the new characters and downplaying the focus of the few new characters who did show up. This was a move that did NOT sit well with the staff. In response, "Attack of the Robot Rat" had the writers shoot back by making it a very mean-spirited parody of the Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons.
  • "Phoney Phelix" can also be seen as a Stealth Parody of the retool of Season 2, with Felix having his show hijacked by an imbecilic imposter who imitates some of the traits of Oriolo Felix such as saying his "Righty-O!" catchphrase, singing the TV show theme song, and using a (shoddy knockoff) of the magic bag of tricks. It even takes brief jabs at Film Roman (the company that made the show), Spumco (where the artist used to work on Ren and Stimpy) and the industry as a whole where the Knockoff character can't find work unless he has a hit movie or successful toyline.
  • "Background Details" takes jabs at the show's hectic production such as being unfocused and taxing on the artists and later having them come up with an episode being completely random.
  • "The Fuzzy Bunny Show" takes it a step further by having a direct snipe at Don Oriolo with a caricature of himself being responsible for getting Felix's show canceled in favor of the cutesy bunny cartoon and the TV executive congratulating him. The building there in is called APC Network, a jab at CBS.
  • "Wizards and Lizards" has a running gag with a network executive giving Felix suggestions to improve the show and even scolding him at the end of the episode for being too mean and violent. This was another jab at CBS for wanting the show to be more kid-friendly.