Almost all funny animal superheroes from the 1940s through the 1960s were inspired by the most popular hero of the day, Superman.
But not this one.
“I was in Hollywood,” Batman co-creator Bob Kane told comics historian Will Murray, “and I was always interested in animation. I met this animated studio head — his name was (Sam) Singer — and we were out one night and he said, ‘We’re looking for some new stuff. Do you have anything in mind?’
“I said, ‘Why don’t we do a cat and a mouse in the kind of stylized cartoony image of Batman and Robin? We’ll have a Catmobile. And the Frog will be one of the villains, like the Penguin, and speak like Edward G. Robinson.’
“It was very simple: I used the same format as Batman and Robin.”
Comics historian Joseph Lenius quipped, “Bob Kane retrofits Batman and Robin into a cat and a mouse (and knowing him, maybe it’s really Bill Finger who does that), and then gives himself a big pat on the back.”
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse debuted Sept. 14, 1960, as a cartoon included on The Tommy Seven Show on NYC’s WABC Channel 7.
“Titled Disguise the Limit, (the first episode) opened with Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse roaring out of the Cat Cave — its mouth is shaped like a cat’s head — in their fire engine-red Catmobile, which is equipped with supercharger coils 30 years out-of-date at the time the show aired,” Murray noted.
“Like the Batmobile, the Catmobile has a huge stylized head mounted in front. Instead of a bat’s black head, it’s a black cat-head with green feline eyes. The difference is hard to distinguish. They forgot to draw whiskers.”
Unlike the hyper-competent Robin, Minute Mouse was designed to be inept. “Minute Mouse was his clumsy little helper who always bungled the case just when Courageous Cat was about to solve it,” Kane wrote.
“Whenever fighting bad guys, Courageous Cat would use his all-purpose Cat Gun or a vast variety of different deus ex machina ‘trick guns’ he pulls out of his cape that (like the Green Arrow’s trick arrows) fire whatever the situation requires like a rope, some water, a parachute, cages, boxing gloves, lightning-like magnetic rays or even more bizarre ammunition, and even the occasional actual bullet,” Wikipedia notes.
“In case of emergency, Courageous also has extra pre-James Bond secret gadgets hidden in his belt buckle and the star emblem on his chest.”
“The memorable theme music by Johnny Holiday features a walking bass line and is fashioned after the theme for Peter Gunn,” Wikipedia reports. “In many ways, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse presages the camp aspects of the later Batman live action series, which William Dozier and Howie Horwitz produced as a villain-driven action-comedy lampoon. Storyboard design was by Kane’s assistant/ghost Sheldon Moldoff.”
“They weren’t toondom’s first unnatural partnership between a cat and a mouse — Hanna-Barbera’s Snooper & Blabber beat them onto the air by a year,” observed comics historian Don Markstein.
“Like a lot of early TV animation, such as Col. Bleep and Clutch Cargo, it was made in the form of five-minute episodes, with small budgets and therefore low production values. Like Tom Terrific and Crusader Rabbit, also done that way, they’re fondly recalled by their then-youthful audience. The episodes were originally collected into half-hour shows… 130 were made.”
Courageous Cat was one comic book superhero who, oddly enough, never appeared in a comic book.
He had two coloring books, matchbooks, a vinyl record, a Courageous Cat Sliding Squares Puzzle, a Super Slate and a Collegeville Courageous Cat Halloween costume, but never a comic book
