Friday, October 2, 2015

Looney TV: Hyde & Go Tweet (1960)

Friz Freleng must've been a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. How else to explain the fact that Freleng used the book as source material for not one, not two, but three shorts, two of them starring Sylvester.

However, it's Tweety who gets top billing in 1960's "Hyde & Go Tweet", in which Freleng tweaks the traditional story by making the formula so unpredictable that both Dr. Jekyll, who appears briefly, and Tweety, after a dive into the bottle of formula to escape Sylvester, change at inopportune times during the day. None of this is going on at night.



Freleng's other adaptation featured Bugs Bunny, and if we're lucky, we'll see "Hyde & Hare" before this month is out.

Rating: B-.

2 comments:

SaturdayMorningFan said...

I have always loved this one, it's certainly my favorite Tweety cartoon. I was irate it wasn't included on any of the Golden and Platinum collections, and it wasn't even on the Superstars Tweety & Sylvester DVD. It did show up in a restored compilation movie (can't remember which one), but the beginning and ending are truncated and "new" footage intertwined, so it doesn't really count. What a travesty!

hobbyfan said...

Considering the year it was made, I'd say maybe there's still a chance it gets a full DVD release.