Let's Watch This: "Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats" (1988)

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the movie I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this movie, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

Remember how I said in my review of Top Cat: The Movie that it actually wasn't the first movie that T.C. starred in? And remember how I said that we'd be looking at the actual first movie that they starred in another time? Well, guess what we're reviewing today?

That's right, it's Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats! This film, directed by Paul Sommer and Charles A. Nichols, has a few things over the 2011 film we've already looked at. First of all, it was made by Hanna-Barbera themselves as part of the Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 series of films. I've already looked at another one of those films, Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose, and we'll probably be reviewing all ten of them at some point on this blog. I suppose I probably should've reviewed them in the order that they aired, but that ship has sailed (Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose was the fourth one). Second, they were able to get most of the original voice cast back - only Benny the Ball and Officer Dibble had to be recast. The film aired in syndication on March 20th, 1988. It's also been released on both VHS and DVD.

I'm not sure how often this reaired on TV, but I do know it aired at least once on Boomerang. How do I know this? Because I saw it on Boomerang at some point in the 2000s! This was back when Boomerang would air ANYTHING Hanna-Barbera made, and they certainly weren't going to let how obscure it was stop them. To prove my point, I'll add that I also saw Hanna-Barbera's Jack and the Beanstalk movie with Gene Kelly on Boomerang during the 2000s, too. I really do have Boomerang to thank for making me a fan of Hanna-Barbera. Now, whether or not Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats is a good movie, I don't recall. But that's what we're here to find out today!

The film opens on a beautiful morning in Manhattan (for those unaware, that's where the show takes place). Top Cat (voiced by Arnold Stang) wakes up, jumps out of his trash can, and summons all of the other members of his gang. You know which one is which, don't you? Well, just in case you don't, in order we have...

- Benny the Ball (voiced by Avery Schreiber as opposed to Maurice Gosfield), the short blue one and Top Cat's right-hand... er, right-paw... man... er, cat.

- Choo-Choo (Marvin Kaplan), the pink cat in the turtleneck who kind of looks like Snagglepuss... who seems to be missing. Maybe he's on vacation or something?

- Fancy-Fancy (John Stephenson), the brown ladies' man cat.

- Spook (Leo De Lyon), the greenish one who talks like a beatnik.

- And Brain (also Leo De Lyon), the orange one with the purple shirt who's a few French fries short of a Happy Meal.

There. Now you have no excuse for not telling them apart.

Although Fancy-Fancy seems to have turned orange for this movie, so telling him and
Brain apart when they're both wearing the boy scout getup could be difficult. Just look at
their eyes - Brain's always got that half-lidded expression.

Today, Top Cat and his boys are acting as boy scouts, doing good deeds like returning hats that blow off of peoples' heads - after using a fan to blow the hats off their heads themselves. While he's out looking for a good deed to do, Benny notices an old lady in tattered clothing pushing a shopping cart full of junk. Clearly she must be homeless. Or at least very eccentric.

He runs over and tries to help her cross the street, but this old lady's got an attitude problem. One thing leads to another, and her cart winds up smashed by a car.

"Wait, you mean this ISN'T the dairy aisle at Whole Foods?!"

"Nope! It's a Manhattan sidewalk!"

"Dagnabbit! I really gotta get myself some glasses..."

Well, Benny might not be getting a merit badge for helping an old lady across the street, but he DOES save her from getting crushed by a bunch of sacks and barrels falling from a great height. Fortunately, even though this is a cartoon, the old lady isn't all "you saved my life, so now I'm going to be your servant and follow you around driving you crazy until I save your life and we're even". Instead, she takes out her memory book and asks Benny to write his name in it. That way, she'll always remember the cat who saved her life.

After Benny leaves, a limo drives up to the old lady and she steps inside. Her name is Gertrude Vandergelt (Linda Gary), and she's not homeless - quite the opposite, in fact. She's rich. Very, very rich. And as her limo driver, James (Rob Paulsen) drives her back to her mansion in Beverly Hills... wait a minute, they drove all the way from Beverly Hills, which is in California, to Manhattan, which is in New York, and back again? They're on opposite sides of the country! I sure hope James is getting paid well for driving her...

"Beverly Hills, that's where I wanna be...
Gimme, gimme, livin' in Beverly Hills..."

As they drive by the Beverly Hills Car Wash, Gertrude mentions that she wishes her niece Amy were there to enjoy the sights with her, but she's been missing for quite some time. Unbeknownst to her, Amy (Lilly Moon) is currently working at that very car wash, and she's miserable. It's a pity that, in all of the time that Amy's supposedly been missing, Gertrude never went inside that car wash. Of course, since she's rich I'm sure she has servants to wash her car for her, but still...

There's a joke here about how, since it's Beverly Hills, they wash the cars with bottled
mineral water. That's kind of funny, I guess.

Back in Manhattan, T.C.'s gang meets back up in the alley to show him what they've gotten as rewards for doing good deeds. Choo-Choo... yes, he's here now, I guess the animators just forgot to put him in the first scene... brings back a giant tire. Great, now all they need is some rope and they can make a swing out of it. Fancy-Fancy brings back... wet laundry. Apparently he was taking a nap in the dryer... which is incredibly dangerous, Fancy-Fancy! Don't take a nap in a DRYER! Or a washing machine, for that matter!

T.C., if you're gonna do a Groucho Marx impression, you gotta have the mustache, the
glasses, and the bushy eyebrows. Maybe the Genie from Aladdin can give you some pointers...

But then Officer Dibble (John Stephenson as opposed to Allen Jenkins) shows up, and he is MAD! You see, Brain's "good deed" was to splash mud on the windshield of his police car so he could clean it. Officer Dibble is all "I'm gonna make sure you guys get the book thrown at you!" but then he randomly gets a call on his radio telling him that he's been given permission to quit the force, which immediately makes him giddy. And I know Hanna-Barbera isn't known for having the best animation, but I have to bring this up: the animators can't seem to decide which kind of eyes they want Officer Dibble to have. He keeps switching back and forth between having the dot eyes he had in the original show, having pupils, and having pupils but without the whites of the eyes being colored in (a la The Roman Holidays).

I tried to take a screencap to demonstrate, but wound up with this one where Dibble's
eyes were closed.

One week later, Top Cat decides to dress up as a fortune teller. Yes, this means that we get to see T.C. in drag... and I'm getting flashbacks to Lilo and Stitch: The Series. He practices his fortune telling by reading Benny's palm, telling him that he will meet a tall, dark stranger. "Maybe it'll be Magic Johnson!" Benny exclaims.

If she's a lady, I'm a Verminious Knid

Just then, some guy named Sid Buckman of Buckman, Buckman, Buckman and Cash (Richard Erdman) walks in and says that he needs to talk to Benny. He tells them that Gertrude Vandergelt, heiress to the Vandergelt Diamond Mines, has died and that she's named Benny in her will, which he'll be reading that night in Beverly Hills. T.C., of course, is all over that.

So Top Cat and his gang go to Beverly Hills... how exactly they got there, I don't know, I doubt they can afford plane tickets... and hitch a ride on the back of a tour bus. Did you know that the Flintstones live in Beverly Hills? Neither did I, but they do!

So do the Rubbles, but I don't have a screencap of them, sorry.

When they get to the Vandergelt Mansion, Top Cat discovers that someone else has taken up residence in Beverly Hills - Officer Dibble! He's now the Vandergelt Mansion's security guard. The heck? You leave the police force and THIS is what you decide to do?

"What's the password, T.C.?"

"Uh... Bill and Joe sent me?"

After their little encounter with Dibble, they walk up to the front door of the mansion and are greeted by Gertrude's sinister-looking butler Snerdly (Henry Polic II), as well as his Russian wolfhound Rasputin (Frank Welker). It's a little weird that in this world, cats are anthropomorphic but dogs aren't... especially considering that the 2011 movie had anthropomorphic dogs in it. I guess it's best that we don't think about it too much.

Gee, I wonder if these two are the villains of the film...

The reading of the will starts up, and we learn that Gertrude left everything to her niece. But since said niece is missing, she decided to leave everything to Benny instead. Everyone else at the reading is MAD - especially Snerdly - because THEY wanted that money, but of course, there's a part of the will that mentions if anything happens to Benny in the next eighty-four hours then the money will go to Snerdly. And you know that Snerdly is gonna take advantage of this.

Top Cat suggests that Benny move into the mansion, but Benny is reluctant to leave the alley until T.C. says that he, Fancy-Fancy, Choo-Choo, Brain, and Spook will be moving in as well. "As I said when those Siamese moved next door, there goes the neighborhood!" Snerdly tells Rasputin... which I guess means that Snerdly is racist. Dibble doesn't seem too jazzed about T.C. and the gang moving in either.

First, Snerdly and Rasputin convince Benny to float in a pool raft called "Titanic II". Tell me, would YOU get on a boat called "Titanic II"?

Fortunately for Snerdly, Benny doesn't recognize a giant red flag when he
sees it.

While Benny's in the raft, Rasputin disguises himself as a shark, and when Benny screams for help, Snerdly dives into the water and shoots his raft with a harpoon... I'm not sure why that required Rasputin to put on a shark fin, but whatever. The raft deflates, and Benny sinks... only for Top Cat to catch him with his fishing rod. Benny: one, Snerdly: zilch.

Choo-Choo and Spook, clearly more Genre Savvy than anyone else in this film, suggest that maybe somebody is trying to get rid of Benny so they can get the money for themselves. Alas, Top Cat shrugs that idea off. Perhaps if he hadn't, he would've found out that Snerdly is currently preparing a salad for Benny doused with hot sauce. Call me crazy, but I don't think hot sauce is lethal. Not that it matters, since Brain winds up knocking the salad into the pool when Snerdly attempts to serve it.

Shouldn't this movie actually be called Benny the Ball and the Beverly Hills Cats?
He's clearly the main character here, not Top Cat...

Snerdly declares that it's time to take off the gloves... and promptly takes off one of HIS skin-toned gloves, revealing himself to have a mechanical hand underneath. Holy frijoles, he's a CYBORG? Where the heck did THIS twist come from? What else do we not know about Snerdly? Did he kill Gertrude so that he'd get her fortune? Did he cause Amy to go missing?! I wouldn't be surprised at this point!

Speaking of Amy, we cut back to her at the car wash, and guess who's there talking to her? Snerdly! So he knows where she is but he never told Gertrude? The fiend! And how was he able to keep this from her? I need answers! But we're gonna have to wait until later to hear them, because next we see the mansion get a visit from Lester Pester (also Rob Paulsen), the host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Furry. Top Cat hogs the interview while Snerdly and Rasputin keep attempting to kill Benny and fail at it thanks to WHACKY SHENANIGANS. However, they do manage to lock him in a sauna, shrinking him down in size.

Also, Top Cat randomly turns pink.

"No, no, Larry! Top Cat is YELLOW! Choo-Choo is the pink cat!"

"Crap. Well, maybe nobody will notice..."

By now, Top Cat and Benny are both convinced that Snerdly is indeed out for blood and Benny wants to get the heck out of Beverly Hills and go back to the alley. And I personally don't blame him at this point. To get Benny back to his normal size, T.C. inflates him with an air pump - a bit too much, resulting in him gaining the ability of flight. Upon seeing this, Snerdly - who was just about to use dark magic - decides to use a crossbow at him. The arrow... goes right by him, but Benny starts deflating anyway.

Hey, Snerdly, Mickey Mouse called. He wants his sorceror's hat back.

Thus begins a very long sequence in which Top Cat and the others try to catch Benny, only for him to keep bouncing off the trampoline they're holding and eventually land on a flagpole. Then he slides off the flagpole and lands on Officer Dibble. Then it's time for a party!

Snerdly (who names their kid that, anyway?) realizes that in order to get rid of Benny, they'll have to get Top Cat out of the picture first. But how? He'll have to use his secret weapon: some furry's DeviantArt OC!

You can tell she's a girl cat because she has hair. And a curvy figure, we can't forget
THAT.

So Snerdly calls up the glamorous Kitty Glitter (Teresa Ganzel) and convinces her to go out with Top Cat, claiming that he's one of the richest bachelors in town. You see, Kitty is what is known as a Gold Digger. Give Trixie some credit, at least she wasn't THAT.

To be fair, Kitty DOES need the money. She hasn't been doing well financially since
the Danger Rangers disbanded.

When Snerdly reveals to Top Cat that he's arranged for him to go out with Kitty, T.C. instantly forgets all about the whole "clearly trying to kill Benny" thing. But neither one counted on WHACKY SHENANIGANS ensuing, and this time they result in Kitty mistaking Brain for Top Cat. She takes him to a pet store... which sells mink coats for some reason? Do they skin whatever pets they don't sell?

I wonder if Brain finds it all strange that Kitty is wearing a wedding dress.

Eventually, Kitty gets a call from Snerdly informing her that she is NOT on a date with Top Cat but rather an "imposter". Enraged, she dumps soup on Brain's head. Back at the mansion, Snerdly suggests that the cats have a costume party to celebrate Benny getting the money. So Top Cat dresses as a pirate, Spook dresses as Cleopatra (another crossdressing joke), Fancy-Fancy dresses as a clown, Choo-Choo dresses as Napoleon, and Snerdly gives Benny a dog's head mask that looks like they chopped the head off a Pound Puppy.

"I've always wondered what it's like to have pupils instead of jut black dots for eyes!"

Brain returns, and when he sees Benny with the dog mask on, he thinks that a dog ate Benny. For some reason, it takes forever for Benny to take off the mask and reveal himself to Brain. And in case you're wondering what Snerdly's plan is now, he calls up the dog pound and tells the dogcatcher (Kenneth Mars) that there's a mongrel running around the mansion. Isn't he at all worried that they might take Rasputin too?

The party starts up, Brain dresses as a harem girl... that's THREE crossdressing jokes, somebody on the writing staff clearly thought that cats in womens' clothing was a riot... and T.C. meets up with Kitty. Then the cats do a rap song that summarizes the plot so far. It's pretty cringe-worthy, but still not as cringe-worthy as anything Jellystone! did with these characters.

While the cats are being hip and cool with the kids, yo, Snerdly gets Benny nabbed by the guy from the dog pound. The others go looking for him, eventually running into Officer Dibble, who tells them that he saw a dogcatcher's van drive off. They put two and two together. "Benny's been catnapped!" Choo-Choo exclaims. "And sneaky Snerdly set him up!" Top Cat adds. As for Benny, he's been put in a cell at the pound. It apparently hasn't occured to him to just take the mask off.

"Hey, T.C., aren't your vest adn hat usually purple? How come they're red all of
a sudden?"

The cats go to the pound, and T.C. tries to sneak in and free Benny, only to run into the guy who runs the pound and his doberman. Fortunatley, Benny somehow managed to climb into the air ducts (his cellmate told him about it - so apparently dogs can talk in this world, although they still don't wear clothes?) and he saves T.C., only for the guy to fill the air ducts with water. He's trying to drown them?! This guy's psychotic!

Fortunately, WHACKY SHENANIGANS result in the entire dog pound almost falling apart. In the chaos, T.C., Benny, and the dogs escape. "TALK ABOUT BEIN' IN THE DOGHOUSE! THEY'LL PAY FOR THIS!" Mr. Attempts to Drown Cats declares. The cats need to get back to the mansion ASAP, it's only fifteen minutes to midnight, but the dogcatcher's chasing after them in his vehicle might make that difficult. To get away, they hide in the car wash. The very same car wash where Amy works. Remember Amy? She's still in this movie. Benny identifies her, and she explains that she's been stuck working at the car wash thanks to her benefactor Snerdly. And then the dogcatcher shows up and is all "NOT SO FAST, PUNKS!".

I guess he's just going to ignore that Benny took the mask off, revealing that he is
not, in fact, a dog (why did it take Benny so long to take it off anyway?).

Amy defeats the evil dogcatcher by sending him through the car wash, and they get in the limo and drive back to the mansion... only to run out of gas halfway there. Gotta stretch out the runtime some more, I guess. And to make matters worse, the dogcatcher shows up again. Dude, just let it go. So how do they defeat him this time? They just run away. Okay, fine. Just get them back to the mansion so Snerdly won't get the money already.

After they run into a genuine Beverly Hills Cop - who, yes, sounds like Eddie Murphy - they make it back to the mansion with two minutes to spare. But Officer Dibble won't let them in. Why? Because Snerdly gave him strict orders not to let any animals, even the heir to the fortune, in. And despite Snerdly's being the most blatant villain ever, Dibble is going to obey. Fortunately, Dibble winds up falling asleep. Some security guard. Unfortunately, it's midnight, so even when the good guys from entering the house via the chimney, Snerdly claims that the money is his and Rasputin's. There's only one problem with that. Sid Buckman reveals that he's actually been Gertrude in disguise the whole time!

What a twist!

Yes, Gertrude knew that Snerdly was secretly evil and this was all just an elaborate scheme to get him to reveal his evilness. But he and Rasputin make a run for it while she's ranting about how evil he is, with Snerdly putting on the dog mask so no one will recognize him. As they're trying to sneak out, however, Dibble stops them because he thinks Snerdly is Benny. Y'know, even though Snerdly is much taller and dressed differently. But he lets them walk right by... for some reason... only for them to get nabbed by the dogcatcher and thrown into his vehicle. So Snerdly's going to the pound?

Nope. He and Rasputin manage to escape... and then run onto a movie set... and then the dogcatcher shows up and nabs them again. Meaning that there was no point in having them escape except to pad out the run time some more.

Top Cat and his gang head back to the alley, and Dibble rejoins the police force. Kitty shows up, finds out that T.C.'s not really rich, and rejects him. Amy pays them a visit, and we finally end the movie with another rap song.

Wow, those cats are totally tubular! Radical! Bodacious! Other 1980s slang!

What's the Verdict?

My apologies to Paul Sommer and Charles A. Nichols, but this movie is pretty weak. Even worse than the 2011 movie, in fact. The main problem is that it's tremendously dull and monotonous. This plot didn't need to be two hours long. Sequences are stretched out to absurd lengths (we didn't need, like, ten minutes of the bad guys getting captured by the dogcatcher, and then escaping, and then getting captured again). Very few of the jokes are funny. The new characters are boring non-entities, with the exception of Snerdly and Rasputin who are basically just duller versions of Dick Dastardly and Muttley. Plot points start up and then are forgotten about for the longest time. Also, for some reason, even though most of the original voices returned for this, a few characters sound a bit off. Top Cat sounds more like Jimmy Durante now, for one thing.

My suggestion? Just watch the original Top Cat show instead. I'd only recommend watching this if you're a HUGE Top Cat fan. Like, if he's your favorite Hanna-Barbera character. Between this and The Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose being mediocre, I'm honestly kind of nervous about reviewing the other Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 movies. Although I do remember finding The Good, the Bad, and the Huckleberry Hound and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School alright, so there's that.