Pat Sullivan Cartoons
Directed by: Otto Messmer

Cat Out of the Bag Alert!  This review contains some spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Felix comes to the rescue when the hometown baseball team is in danger of losing.

Cartoon Cat: One of the few early silent Felix the Cat cartoons still known to exist. Felix is playing baseball with Willie Brown and the other boys when he hits a policeman with a line drive.

The policeman chases Willie all around town and finally has a “fly cop” arrest him from the top of a building. Felix does his iconic thinking walk as he ponders what to do.

Felix sees that the home team, the Nifty Nine, are losing to the Tar Heels (an all-black team drawn in outdated caricature).

Another thing common in these early Felix cartoons is his use of exclamation and question marks to climb when they appear above his head. In this case he uses a tower of question marks to climb up to Willie in jail.

The use of real photographs and film footage in this short is prevalant as when Felix asks a cab driver to take him to the polo fields (he jumps off at the train station instead, not able to pay the fare).

Felix pinch hits for Willie and sets his plan in motion to slam the ball up to the cloud and hit Jupiter so that he gets mad and rains out the game, which is what happens.

Felix returns to the jail for a celebratory dance with Willie.

At the end of the film is a short tag showing Felix coming out of the animator’s pen.

Final Mewsings: Who said cats aren’t into team sports?

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