June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

Directed and written by Ralph Bakshi, and based on Robert Crumb’s comic, this was an attempt by Bakshi to expand cartoons beyond just being for kids, while creating an independent alternative to Disney for animated movies. Crumb and Bakshi met, during which time the animator showed Crumb drawings that had been created as a result of his learning the cartoonist’s style. Crumb gave him a sketchboard for reference. A good start, but by the end, Crumb felt this movie was making fun of hippies and Bakshi would call the comic artist “one of the slickest hustlers you’ll ever see in your life.”

Crumb said of the movie that it was “really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi’s confusion, you know. There’s something real repressed about it. In a way, it’s more twisted than my stuff. It’s really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.  … I didn’t like that sex attitude in it very much. It’s like real repressed horniness; he’s kind of letting it out compulsively.”

Animated by several Terrytunes artists and the first cartoon to be rated X, this finds Fritz (Skip Hinnant) on several adventures, from making love to three female cats in a bathtub to a raid by cops, starting a riot, surviving the carpet bombing of Harlem and then getting blown up real good, somehow surviving that to make love to even more ladies on what should be his death bed.

Ralph’s voice is Phil Seuling, who started some of New York City’s first comic conventions and ran an early comic book distributor, Sea Gate.

Crumb killed off Fritz in a comic called Fritz the Cat Superstar to prevent further films from being made, but The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat was still produced, even without Bakshi and Crumb being involved.