Top Cat or kids these days

Cafe Society
21

Fancy, the womanizer with the scarf and voiced by Daws Butler, sounded like Tony Curtis. TC was indeed modeled after Phil Silvers as Sgt Bilko.

Arnold Stang, BTW, was perhaps most memorably in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, along with Marvin Kaplan, who voiced Choo-Choo. They were the owners of the garage/service station that was demolished by Jonathan Winters, who had been set off by none other than Phil Silvers. CONNECTION!

I’d look up the “Top Cat” lyrics on the Internet, but I wouldn’t trust them unless they come from an official source. If anyone wants to contact Hanna-Barbera directly, be my guest. I’d like to know if I’ve been right or wrong all these years.

22

I’m still waiting to find out what the lyrics (and the F-word) has to do with kids these days…

23

Dora, Dora, Dora the Explorer!
Boots and Super cool Explorer Dora
Grab your backpack!
Let’s go!
Jump in!
Vamanos!
You can lead the way-ay.

9 multisyllabic words (including repetitions), 2 languages.

Suck it, 1961. :wink:

24

Is it a kids show? My mother insists it was meant for adults, and I remember it being boring as hell when I was a kid so I’m also inclined to think kids weren’t the intended audience.

25

Explorer? Imean, sure the kid may have to ask “what does vamanos mean?” but “explorer” can’t compare to:

  • effectual
    intellectual
    indisputable *

Now, see modern lyrics for young kids are all silly, meaningless non-intellectually stimulating babble.

Old kids listen to crap that goes like “Fuck the motherfucking bitches, cap them motherfucking whores…”

26

Like The Flintstones, it was supposed to be a Kids show that Mom & Dad could watch also. They had a few in-jokes aimed at the older crowd. Family TV time used to be a pretty big deal.

27

Do you even have young (i.e., that you are currently raising) kids?

If you do, you will have no doubt that the “intellectual climate” for kids is not “meaningless non-intellectually stimulating babble” with words like “Fuck the motherfucking bitches…” If, on the other hand, you don’t, I can see why you’re confused. :rolleyes:

Top Cat is a TV show aimed at the family. Dora is a TV show aimed at 3yo’s. To compare the two lyrics and claim that because one uses the word “effectual” and the other doesn’t, it shows that 1961 kids were somehow smarter is pretty damned idiotic.

28

Really? I thought it was supposed to be Cary Grant.

29

Can we play find “grown-up” words in kids theme songs?

From Spongebob Squarepants

Absorbant, porous, nautical
Phineas and Ferb

Annual, generation, nanobot, continent

30

Right. I was thinking of Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, in which he did Cary Grant as well.

31

Not bad, I admit.

32

Whether he does or not, he wants them off his lawn.

33

Somebody help me out here. Wasn’t there a gay-themed cartoon not long ago that parodied this lyric? I remember it had a character modeled after Paul Lynde named Bi-Polar Bear, but can’t remember much else.

“He’s ineffectual! He’s intellectual!”

34

In Britain, Top Cat was shown in the TV listings as Boss Cat, because IIRC there was a brand of cat food called Top Cat and so it would have contravened the strict advertising rules in place at the time.

As kids we always found it a bit odd that the title was different on the actual show. And we (or certainly I) could never make head nor tail of the lyrics:

Top Cat!
He’s mostly sexual
Top Cat!
Whose intellectual
Postmen get to call him TC
Pro fighting is whipped in the tea… WTF?