"I say, you don't think the Looney Tunes franchise is running out of gas, do you?"
Cool Cat is a 1967 Looney Tunes short, directed by Alex Lovy. While it was the fourth short produced by the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts animation studio, in many ways it can be seen as where the Seven Arts era really got going, as it was the first cartoon to carry the new studio logo and theme arrangement, as well as the first one to focus on new characters, and the first one to have Larry Storch as the main voice actor, supplanting Mel Blanc.A big game hunter named Colonel Rimfire is having a fruitless time hunting in an African jungle, when he comes across a beret-wearing beatnik tiger named Cool Cat. A misunderstanding separates Rimfire from Ella, the mechanical elephant he uses as his camouflage while hunting, leading to Cool Cat apparently mistaking Ella for a real elephant and trying to each her the ways of the jungle. Rimfire in turn suffers further mishaps including mistaking a real elephant for Ella, trying to blow up the tiger with an "exploding pineapple" (aka a hand grenade), and various failed attempts to ambush Cool Cat.
Tropes include:
- Animation Bump: The "exploding pineapple" sequence has noticeably more fluid animation than the rest of the short.
- Captain Ersatz: Cool Cat himself very clearly takes inspiration from The Pink Panther, while Colonel Rimfire is equal parts Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam.
- Captain Obvious: At one point Cool Cat mentions that it's important that they get Ella something to eat, because "food is very important, especially when you're hungry."
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- While the new Warner Bros.-Seven Arts logo and theme arrangement makes its debut here, it uses the same purple-on-black color scheme as most of the DePatie Freleng shorts. This would be kept for two more shorts, before it was realized that the new logo was difficult to make out, leading to them switching to a more legible yellow-on-blue color scheme for the remainder of the Seven Arts era.
- The short has an actual song for its opening, sung by The Clingers. While the song's instrumentals would be re-used in his future shorts, the lyrics were never used again.
- Here, Ella is apparently just some sort of truck whose outside is made up to look like an elephant. In the few future appearances that she's had, she's depicted as an actual robot who's capable of operating independently of Rimfire (albeit in a relatively limited way).
- Epic Fail: The entire "exploding pineapple" debacle turns into this for Rimfire. First, he unknowingly pulls his dentures out of his mouth when trying to yank the pin out with his teethnote , and throws the unarmed grenade at Cool Cat. Then when Cool Cat tosses it back in his direction, Rimfire somehow mistakes the chattering dentures for a tarantula and blasts at them with his gun, setting off the grenade.
- Failed a Spot Check: Rimfire somehow mistakes a male elephant for Ella, and doesn't realize his mistake until he's severely pissed off the elephant by yanking at its back skin trying to open where the hatch on Ella's back would be.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: After getting smashed against a cliff face by the runaway Ella, Rimfire angrily gives up on hunting Cool Cat... and then realizes that Ella is out of gas, forcing him to walk 2,000 miles to the nearest fuel station.
- Limited Animation: A little less apparent than in the Seven Arts shorts with Daffy and Speedy, as Cool Cat and Colonel Rimfire were designed with this kind of animation in mind from the outset, but the animation still tends to be very jerky and limited.
- Non-Fatal Explosions: Rimfire isn't harmed by a grenade exploding practically in his face, although his dentures are blown to shreds.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: While Cool Cat spends the whole short seemingly acting like The Ditz and being unaware that Ella's not a real elephant or that Rimfire's out to kill him, the ending indicates that he knew these things full well all along, and was just pretending not to so as to lull Rimfire into a false sense of security.
- Oddball in the Series: Unlike the other Seven Arts shorts which used traditional painted backgrounds, this one has sketchy, stylized backgrounds that are more in line with what was seen in DePatie-Freleng's cartoons, and is somewhat reminiscent of the kind of backgrounds used in The Ant and the Aardvark, despite predating that series by over a year.
- Shout-Out: When Cool Cat walks by Ella, Rimfire pops out of the hatch and declares "I tawt I taw a puddy tat! A tiger-type puddy tat!"
