A visitor kindly reminded me about Courageous Cat and said that this cartoon cat is easily overlooked. Thanks for the reminder.
This cartoon cat was created by Bob Kane who also created the Batman cartoon series, I think.
It was a Trans-Artist series, which was syndicated in 1961. There were 85 episodes. The voice of both characters, cat and mouse, was provided by Bob McFadden. Jeff Roven of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals says that, "the animation is stiff and the drawing unexciting...the nutty gadgets and villians are entertaining enough."
Below is a slightly poor quality copy but useful nonetheless. There are copyright issues in publishing cartoon cat characters on websites so this might be removed or go blank one day!
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse were, it seems, based on Batman or was it the other way around? They protect the anthropomorphic (try and spell that...!) animals of a fictional city called Empire City.
These "super heroes" do not have super powers but solve crime by superior deductive skills..or at least that is the intention. Sometimes it is, "dumb luck".
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse live in a "Cat Cave" in the hills overlooking the city. You can see them roaring out of the cave in the video clip.
They leap into action when the city police force flash a signal on TV. They race to the crime in their Catmobile. The Catmobile is a transformer of sorts. It transforms into a Catplane or the Submobile at the touch of a button. It contains a host of gadgets such as a carphone which must have been novel in 1961.
Courageous Cat has an arsenal of guns: balloon gun - he can fly with it, refrigerated air-gun, flashlight gun, rope gun, magnet gun (it shoots magnets), cannonball-interrupter which stops cannonballs, shark-repellant gun, sword gun, can-opener gun, umbrella gun, rivet gun and a bum's rush gun which is a pair of hands on an extender.
The cat also has a tickling feather which helps to catch villians!
Whereas the cat has all this armory, the mouse has a water pistol!
As can be seen from the video, Courageous Cat wears a red body suit with a 5 pointed star on the chest, black trunks, a yellow belt and cape and white gloves. Minute Mouse wears a green cape and a yellow bodyshirt and white gloves. He does not wear trousers (pants in the USA).
They are both good swimmers but fear ghosts. As for the villains these include: Frog with an Edward G Robinson voice, Professor von Noodle Strudel, a scientist whose invention fall into the hands of criminals.
Thanks for reminding about this cat and thanks also to Jeff Brown who provided the source material.
