While fighting my insomnia in a Vancouver hotel last month when I caught, both, Fritz the Cat and another Fritz movie, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. I must admit the second movie was much more tripped out, and I enjoyed it very much.
Has anyone seen these awesome flicks?
I’m sending this to MPSIMS, where it will get the attention it deserves, I’m sure.
Lynn
I watched Fritz the Cat sometime in the 80s. I remember that I liked it, and that I thought it was very funny; but I remember it being rather “dated” with a lot of 60s talk in it.
…who made Fritz… a cult film once sent me an e-mail. I had asked him if he was contemplating making a sequel to his Lord of The Rings (this was before I found out about the live-action trilogy, okay?). And he wrote me back saying , “No way, Quasi! I’m busy painting.”
I know this is not relevant to the subject, but I thought it was important in that Fritz and other animated films of his are classics, and I seem to have veered off into the realm of IMHO again, dammit!
Stop me before I veer again! 
Quasi
You liked the second more than the first? I’ve never seen the second one, but the first, IMO, way totally awesomely cool. But from what I’ve heard about the second, it wasn’t nearly as good… what did you like about #2?
R. Crumb hated the Fritz the Cat movies so much that he murdered Fritz in a 1973 story (he’d been writing about him since the early '60s).
An ostrich girl stuck in ice pick right in the back of his skull after he watched himself on the Johnny Giraffe Show.
I saw the first Fritz movie many years ago (on the Playboy channel, of all places) and only later became acquainted with R. Crumb’s work. The movies didn’t do the character or the storylines justice, although Bakshi was certainly at or near his peak at the time.
I rented Fritz the Cat sometime last year (from a, sadly, now-defunct video store–don’t think you’d find that at Blockbuster). Parts of it were quite funny, but a lot of it seemed dated to me. Maybe I just had to be there. Social consciousness just doesn’t equal getting high anymore.
I had no idea that there was a second movie. Fat chance of me finding it…in my area, there is now just Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and a really creepy-looking place with creepy-looking employees that has turned their “little back room” into a BIG back room. They might have it, but I’m not sure I’d want to check.
At the end of the tape, there was a blue screen that said something like: “This movie is rated ‘X’. No one under 16 admitted.” So, when did the “age of consent” for X-rated movies get changed, anyway? I noticed that on the video box itself, the movie was rated “R”.
Not to date myself
(hey deb ya wanna do a movie, don’t mind if I do but only if I get to hold our hand)
umm where was I, the Fritz series were X-rated when they were released. I remember sneaking (ok my friend and I lied about our ages, we were in our pre-teens) into Heavy Traffic and Fritz The Cat. So I rented Heavy Traffic as an adult and found it to be political and as some of you have said these movies are “dated” and rather mild sexual innuendo based on today standards.
But remember this was also about the time that the movie Deep Throat was also causing a public outrage and together with Fritz changing American cinema.
Personally, my favorite Ralph Bakshi movie is Wizards, which came out in 1977 and featured Mark Hamill as one of the voices. If all the Ralph you’ve ever seen is Fritz the cat or the awful Lord of the Rings cartoon he did (or worse, Cool World), you owe it to yourself to dig up a copy of Wizards. It’s flawed - I admit that - but flawed genius.
WIZARDS! Wow, does THAT take me back to my mis-spent youth.
Y’know, I just now realized that Bakshi beat Spielberg and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to the ol’ “Just pull out your revolver and blow 'im away” joke by *four years!
I saw Fritz the Cat in college in the late 70’s. I don’t remember much about it, other than it was from Ralph Bakshi.
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This was back in the days when the campus film club was testing the limits of what they could get away with when showing films on campus. They later did Linda Lovelace for President, which pretty much got them disbanded. That was a different college than the one I work for now, though. At this place they were showing hard-core on campus. Some of it was made here. Gail Palmer was a student here at that time. As the story goes, she and some friends saw some low-grade porn, decided they could do better, and did so, in the dorms no less.
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I saw Wizard about then, too, and loved that one. I wonder if the local video store has that one?
Yes, I have seen Fritz the Cat, and I would second Chef Troy’s recommendation on Wizards. I love that movie!
There’s also Streetfight (or Coonskin, depending on how politically correct your local video store is) if you’re curious, but I didn’t think it was that great.
While we’re on the subject of Wizards, did anybody else notice the resemblance of most of the cast to the work of Vaughn Bode? I didn’t see his name in the credits; maybe I wasn’t looking close enough…
Pete
Take off every .sig for great justice!!
It’s kind of weird.
I love Ralph Bakshi,
I love R. Crumb,
I love the Fritz films,
BUT
I don’t think Fritz is Bakshi’s greatest film,
I don’t think the films do Crumb’s work justice,
I, too, think The Nine Lives is better.
I particularly love the great political caricatures in The Nine Lives, including all the Nazi cleptocrats and Henry Kissinger. While Fritz is simply hedonistic, the sequel (directed not by Bakshi, but by Robert Taylor, who later went on to do the Tale Spin TV series) is far more clever, while touching on such uneasy topics as urban decay, the myth of Hitler’s missing testacle, golf, and anal rape.