YMMV / Fritz the Cat

• Adaptation Displacement: Would anyone have known about the Robert Crumb comic if not for this highly controversial movie adaptation?
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was the crow who got hit on actually gay? Or was he so annoyed by the girls flirting with him using positive discrimination that he pretended he was, so they'd leave him alone?
• Awesome Music: "Hey you fuckin' intellectuals, you think you're so where it's at, before you fill your minds with any junk, better listen to Fritz the Cat!"
• Base-Breaking Character: Fritz himself is a major one. Depending on who you ask, he's either funny and charming, or one of the most unlikable characters to ever come from an animated film.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The extended transition sequence with the crow snapping his fingers to a Bo Diddley song comes and goes without much context. It doesn't have any relation to the story nor is there any need to go on for as long as it does, but it's still a fun and memorable little scene.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Duke the Crow, not only for pretty much being the only major character aside from Harriet who isn't a jerk, an idiot, both, or worse, but also for having a likable and funny presence. It only makes his death that much sadder.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Fritz gets a gangbang out of his experiences, but he's learned absolutely nothing and he'll very likely face charges for all the chaos and carnage he's caused. Not to mention Duke is still dead, Harlem is in ruins, and the neo-Nazis are still out there doing god knows what.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The riot scene is uncomfortably familiar to modern audiences thanks to events like Ferguson, the LA Riots and the murder of George Floyd.
  • Speaking of the riot scene, the police using fighter jets against the crows may have seemed like an absurd exaggeration at the time. Then in 1985, Philadelphia police actually carried out an airstrike on a house occupied by the black liberation organization MOVE.
  • The neo-Nazis are reminiscent of the "alt-furry" minority of the Furry Fandom and, to a lesser extent, the Atomwaffen.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point, a college girl asks why an actor like James Earl Jones always has to play black characters. Three or four decades later, we have Michael Clarke Duncan playing The Kingpin, Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury, and Laurence Fishburne playing Perry White.
  • Jones's most famous roles post this film being the voices of Darth Vader (who is white... er, now gray, underneath the armor), and Mufasa (a lion).
  • And not only that, but that scene of the three girls talking to a crow about African-American rights and the plight of the black man in America will probably make a tumblr user either roll on the floor laughing or utterly cringe in disgust at how familiar the exchange is (in regards to Afro-Americans and pretty much any other non-white, able-bodied heterosexual group).
  • Fritz grabbing Al's pistol and saying, "Look at this big fuckin' gun!"
• Memetic Mutation: The shot of Fritz making the "talking too much" gesture to the audience when Winston is chewing him out has become a popular reaction image.
• Once Original, Now Common: It was rated X when it was first released but there's been far more explicit content in animation since 1972. So newer viewers might wonder why it was so controversial.
• Popular with Furries: The series is one of the earliest examples. It has had an influence on furry media.
• Sequelitis: The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat was written and directed by Robert Taylor, without the involvement of Bakshi or Crumb. However, producer Steve Krantz and actor Skip Hinnant worked on both.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Several of the crows are drawn with visible cheekbones to resemble African-American humans. Needless to say, it looks a little... off.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The comic is an early example, although Crumb's graphic novel Oggie and the Beanstalk was more directly an example of this, as it was mistakenly stocked as a children's book by some stores early on in its distribution. Some distributors confused the film and its sequel for children's films. Supposedly, the sequel was even aired on Showtime Family, despite its R rating.

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