Little did I suspect there was a much deeper meaning:Īnimation historian Christopher P. Of course, I just loved Top Cat because it was a cartoon and I was merely a 10-year old kid. They have to avoid Officer Dibble, who is always trying to shut down their scams and rid Hoagy Alley of Top Cat and his gang of grafters once and for all. Bilko before them) had one money-making scheme after another. Lastly, an unlikely contender (as it also came from Hanna Barbera) was the character Hokey Wolf on The Huckleberry Hound Show, whose segment also paralleled The Phil Silvers Show. Other influences include the movie Guys and Dolls, in which actor Stubby Kaye played a short, stout, streetwise gambler: a virtual Benny the Ball prototype. Additionally, Arnold Stang‘s vocal characterisation of the lead character, the eponymous Top Cat, was based on an impression of Phil Silvers‘ voice. Maurice Gosfield, who played Private Duane Doberman in The Phil Silvers Show, provided the voice for Benny the Ball in Top Cat, and Benny’s rotund appearance was based on Gosfield’s. Top Cat and his gang were inspired by the East Side Kids, characters from a series of popular 1940s ‘B’ movies, but their more immediate roots lay in The Phil Silvers Show, a late-1950s military comedy whose lead character (Sergeant Bilko, played by Silvers) was a crafty con-man.

I’ll let the WikiWackyWoo tell you all about that: Top Cat had 2 major influences along with a host of minor ones.

Its competition was The Joey Bishop Show on NBC and Checkmate on CBS. It was originally broadcast on ABC at 8:30PM Wednesdays, sandwiched between The Steve Allen Show and Hawaiian Eye.

Top Cat launched a year after The Flintstones debuted and, just like it, Top Cat was not a Saturday morning cartoon. Top Cat is one of the many cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera, just like Tom & Jerry and The Flintstones, covered elsewhere in these pages.

Topcat cartoon characters