“Out of the night comes a man who saves lives at the risk of his own. Once a circus performer, an aerialist who refused the net. Once a cat burglar, a master among jewel thieves. Now a professional bodyguard. Primitive… savage… in love with danger. T.H.E. Cat!”
“Cat. T. Hewitt Edward Cat,” actor Robert Loggia would announce.
I presume his first name was “Thomas,” but he was too embarrassed to say so.
Really, it would have made more sense for him to be a mystery man called “the Cat” instead of a guy whose actual name was THE Cat. But that’s 1960s TV for you, a place where your mother might well be a car.
In fact, T.H.E. Cat was quite a cool one-season wonder on NBC, a superhero-coded adventurer who was part of TV’s tendency to take very close passes at superheroes without really going all the way.
The show was clearly influenced by Cary Grant’s cat burglar protagonist John Robie in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1995 film To Catch a Thief, as well as Blake Edwards 1958-1961 private eye series Peter Gunn.
As Mitchell Brown recalled, “Robert Loggia starred in this short-lived (26 episodes) half-hour NBC series that premiered in September 1966; consider it yet another in a long line of TV shows where someone with a shady past and (in my best Liam Neeson voice) ‘a very particular set of skills’ uses those skills to help the innocent and powerless find justice (see also: The A-Team, The Equalizer, Leverage, etc.).
“While he did indeed help a number of hard-luck cases, in the end it turned out the one person this former cat burglar couldn’t save was himself: consigned to a dreaded Friday-night time slot, T.H.E. Cat never got a chance to steal fans’ hearts for a second season.
“Dell’s four-issue series managed to keep the flame alive for a few months following the show’s finale in March 1967; the art chores were handled by Jack Sparling with scripts by Joe Gill, a prolific writer whose more popular creations included Charlton’s Captain Atom and The Peacemaker. “
Loggia was an actor with serious stage presence, familiar to later audiences as a general in 1996’s Independence Day and Malcolm in the Middle’s grandpa.
“This fellow I portray has a kind of shady past, like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief,” Loggia said then. “He’s a man of the world who now works as a bodyguard for those who have been threatened with death. Of course, he demands a substantial fee. There is nothing gallant or gratuitous about Cat. He can choose to save or not save a life — it depends on how much he likes or dislikes the subject under attack.”
Loggia researched the role by reading Carl Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House. “I’m stressing the cat concept without playing the animal itself. I’ve been looking at all sorts of cats. The most interesting is the house cat, not lions or tigers. I’m dead serious about using real animals as the basis of a characterization. Method actors do it all the time. I even went to the Central Park Zoo to study a black panther’s movements so I could move correctly.”
“The animated opening and accompanying Lalo Schifrin theme no doubt reminds many TV viewers of the similar opening to Peter Gunn,” noted Will Murray. “Like Honey West the season before, Cat wore a black prowling suit and carried a grappling hook, which he used to scale buildings. He rarely resorted to firearms, preferring a throwing knife carried up one sleeve to his .32 Walther pistol, in addition to his superb martial arts skills.”
Loggia was said to be bitterly disappointed at the show’s cancelation, and spiraled into a mid-life crisis that lasted six years.
“T.H.E. Cat was a series ahead of its time that was never understood by NBC,” Loggia recalled years later. “The muted color, the action by night only, the mystique of deformity and the person of a cat/man was beyond NBC Productions in the sixties. I remember risking life and limb and bringing T. Hewitt Edward Cat to the screen. Foolhardy but free, and now a fond memory.”
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