Scaredy Cat

Scaredy Cat is a 1948 Merrie Melodies short directed by Chuck Jones.
== Plot ==
Porky Pig and his cat, Sylvester, arrive at their new home, which turns out to be a dilapidated old house; it was the only one the real estate agent had. Sylvester is horribly frightened of the creepy-looking place, but the clueless Porky finds it "quaint" and "peaceful", and looks forward to his first night in the place. Sylvester is already holding onto the bottom of Porky's coat, unwilling to let go, when he is spooked by a bat and jumps inside the coat; Porky chastises him for being afraid of the bat. Porky soon heads upstairs to bed and tells Sylvester to do the same, pointing him towards the kitchen. It then becomes clear that that is where Sylvester dares not to tread as unknown to Porky, Sylvester clings to him all the way to the bedroom and into bed. When Porky discovers him in the bed, he kicks him down the stairs, telling him "And stay in that kitchen!". Before long, Sylvester learns that the house is overrun with mice, one wearing an executioner's hood and carrying an axe, who are just in the process of carting off the previous owners' cat to the chopping block.
Terrified, Sylvester races upstairs and hides in Porky's nightshirt, startling him awake and making him think thieves were in the house. Once he sees him, Porky starts to scold "Sylvester! I thought I told you to..." before his cat explains in mime what he had seen downstairs, through imitations of an executioner, the condemned and the beheading itself (using a vase for the head that gets chopped off), concluding with Taps on a bugle imitation. Porky however criticizes Sylvester for what he believes is "ridiculous acting" and orders him out. Sylvester, too frightened to comply, tries to shoot himself in the head with a revolver, which alarms Porky, who tells Sylvester to "stop that, gimme that gu-gu-gu-pi-pistol!" finally taking the gun after a short fight. An embarrassed Porky, after emptying the bullets from the gun, asks a sobbing Sylvester if he wasn't ashamed of what he was going to do, before deciding "Oh, alright. If you're gonna be a big baby, then you can sleep up here."
Just after Porky bids Sylvester goodnight however, four mice (including the executioner) push the bed out of the window, but it thankfully lands on a flagpole. Porky, half-asleep and thinking it is cold in the room, asks Sylvester to close the window. Sylvester proceeds to do so, himself barely awake and walking on thin air, as the flagpole springs the bed back into the room. Sylvester closes a tiny curtain on a birdhouse, gets back into the bed that is not there, whereupon he realizes in panic where he is and falls to the ground. Later, the dazed Sylvester comes through the bedroom door with a big lump on his head. At that moment, he sees that the mice are about to drop an anvil on Porky from a crawlspace behind a painting above the bed. Sylvester grabs the anvil at the last moment. Porky awakes and sees Sylvester poised above him with it in his hands. When Porky asks "And just what were you going to do with that anvil?", Sylvester isn't able to explain that it's not what it looks like; he is hit on the head with the anvil from off-screen. Porky subsequently leads the way back down to the kitchen. Descending the staircase, Sylvester sees the executioner roll a bowling ball down the banister, targeted directly at Porky, who has reached the bottom. Sylvester races down the stairs and shoves Porky out of the way so hard that the pig ends up in the kitchen headfirst in the cat basket, while Sylvester himself is hit on the head by the bowling ball.
Porky storms back from the kitchen (not noticing the basket being lowered below the floor) demanding to know why Sylvester pushed him. Seeing the cat falling over and knocked out, Porky immediately assumes that the cat is "trying to work on [his] sympathies". As Porky picks up the cat thinking his attempt will not work, the executioner attempts to shoot Porky from behind but misses. Porky immediately assumes that it must be mice. After Porky places Sylvester in the basket and leaves the kitchen (narrowly obliviously avoiding various weaponry thrown at him by the mice), Sylvester is lowered beneath the floor into the mice's lair. Hours later, he re-emerges, almost completely white with fright. Waking Porky with a pathetic mew, Porky becomes startled by Sylvester's ghostly appearance. Berating him again, Porky demands Sylvester take off what he thought was make-up. As he drags Sylvester downstairs, with Sylvester's fur returning to normal as they head down, Porky mutters to himself that he should've got a dog. After trying to pull Sylvester off the bottom stair pole, Porky, now at his wit's end, declares "I'm going into that kitchen by myself and prove what a yellow dog of a cowardly cat you really are!" as he heads into the kitchen alone. After a few seconds of silence, Sylvester peers into the kitchen and sure enough, the mice have Porky bound and gagged and on his way to be decapitated; Porky is holding up a sign that reads "YOU WERE RIGHT, SYLVESTER". 
Horrified, Sylvester scrambles out of the house, not stopping until he is a good half-mile away. As he rests to catch his breath, his conscience appears and cuts him to the quick, calling him a coward, reminding him of how Porky raised him from a kitten, showing him the "comparative sizes" of a cat to a mouse, and demanding that he get back in there and "FIGHT!" Suddenly bursting with courage, Sylvester grabs a tree branch for use as a weapon, and then changes his mind and takes the whole tree. Changed from the scaredy cat to a real hero, he races back into the mice-infested house, fights at full power and sends the hordes of murderous rodents running for their lives.
Having got rid of those mice, Porky graciously thanks Sylvester for saving his life, just as the leftover executioner mouse pops out of the longcase clock with a mallet in hand. Porky in panic tries to warn Sylvester of this, but the mouse knocks the cat out. The mouse yanks off his hood, revealing a Lew Lehr caricature in a Napoleonic hat, who ends the cartoon declaring while chuckling (in a variation of Lew Lehr's famous catchphrase), "Pussycats is the cwaziest peoples!".
== Caricatures ==
* Napoleon Bonaparte
* Lew Lehr
== Availability ==
LTVS3'82.png|(1982) VHS The Looney Tunes Video Show Volume 3
516XKXZN4WL.jpg|(1990) VHS Porky Pig (1990)
LOONEY TUNES AFTER DARK.jpg|(1993) LaserDisc Looney Tunes After Dark
Lt collection porky pig.jpg|(1996) VHS Looney Tunes Collection - Porky Pig
Bumper04.jpg|(1996) VHS Special Bumper Collection (Vol. 4)
LTCE VOL 2 RUNNING AMUCK.jpg|(1999) VHS Looney Tunes: The Collectors Edition Volume 2 "Running Amuck" (1998 THIS VERSION, without dubbed notice, with original opening and credits)
LT Golden Collection 1.jpg|(2003) DVD Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 1, Disc Two (1998 "THIS VERSION" print, without dubbed notice, with original opening and credits)
lt cbdp.jpg|(2004) DVD Looney Tunes Collection Best of Daffy and Porky
lt cbdp vcd.jpg|(2004) VCD Looney Tunes Collection Best of Daffy and Porky
Saturday Morning Cartoons 1960s Volume 2.jpg|(2009) DVD Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960s Volume 2, Disc 1 (part of The Porky Pig Show, without the opening and closing titles)
51LA0AzTVqL. SL500 AA300 .jpg|(2011) Blu-ray Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1, Disc One (newly restored, with original opening and credits)
lt bbot dd.jpg|(2011) DVD Daffy Duck
LTPC VOL 1 DVD.jpg|(2012) DVD Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1, Disc One (newly restored, with original opening and credits)
Looney Tunes Showcase - Volume 1.jpg|(2012) Blu-ray Looney Tunes Showcase: Volume 1
lt 3fcbo.jpg|(2012) DVD Looney Tunes 3 Feature Collection Best Of
Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection- Looney Tunes.jpg|(2013) DVD Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection: Looney Tunes
=== Streaming ===
lt hbo max.jpg|HBO Max (2020 - 2023) (same print as Platinum Collection Volume 1)
Lt max.jpg|Max (2023 - ) (same print as Platinum Collection Volume 1)
== Censorship ==
* In the US, both Cartoon Network and Boomerang have aired two versions of this short, each with violent parts edited:
** One version has the Blue Ribbon Merrie Melodies title card and cuts the scenes where Sylvester produces a pistol from a dresser drawer and threatens to kill himself if Porky does not let him stay to protect him from the mice and the scene where Porky bends over to pick up a scared Sylvester and nearly misses being shot by a mouse in a black hood. This was also how the scene was cut when aired on ABC (as part of The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show) and the former WB! network.http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x26z5ji_scaredy-cat-1948_fun
** A rarely shown 1998 dubbed version, with the original opening and credits, which first aired on a 4:00am showing of the Cartoon Network compilation show Bugs and Daffy in 2003 and aired again on a New Year's Day marathon of Looney Tunes cartoons on January 1, 2010, has the original title cards and credits and reinstates the scene where Porky bends over to pick up a scared Sylvester and nearly misses getting shot by a mouse in a black hood, but still edits the scene where Sylvester withdraws a pistol from a drawer and threatens to kill himself with it and fights with Porky over the gun. In contrast to the usual "dissolve-edit" version that aired frequently on Cartoon Network, the new edited version cuts from Porky asking Sylvester to leave his bedroom to Sylvester crying and Porky chastising him for being a crybaby before relenting, and crops the shot of Porky chastising Sylvester for crying so the gun behind Porky's back is never shown. As of 2011, this new edited version is the version that used to air on Cartoon Network and now airs on Boomerang. 
** On the other hand, a few airings of this cartoon in 2011 were unedited.
== Notes ==
* At one point Porky says he should have gotten a dog. This is in stark contrast to several other Porky shorts directed by Chuck Jones, where Charlie Dog tries to get himself adopted by Porky, who says he doesn't want a dog. As this short was released after "Little Orphan Airedale", this could be Porky saying he regrets not adopting Charlie.
* This is the first short where Sylvester is given his name, as prior to that he was unnamed (or in the case of "Tweetie Pie" he was named "Thomas"). This is also the first Sylvester short directed by Chuck Jones.
* This was only one of five post-1948 WB shorts to get a Blue Ribbon reissue prior to 1956 - with the original credits cut. The others were "Daffy Dilly", "The Foghorn Leghorn", "Kit for Cat", and "You Were Never Duckier". "Scaredy Cat" is the latest-released short to have its credits cut upon reissue.
* It was the first of three Jones shorts which placed Porky Pig and Sylvester (in a rare non-speaking role as Porky's pet) in a spooky setting where only Sylvester was aware of the danger, the other two shorts being "Claws for Alarm" (1954) and "Jumpin' Jupiter" (1955).
** This was the only entry in the trilogy in which Porky Pig does eventually realize the danger they are in.
* Parts of this short were used in the Halloween TV special, Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special.
* In this short, there is a brief sequence where Sylvester is reminded by his conscience of how Porky raised him from a kitten. Sylvester's kitten form in this sequence possibly inspired the creation of his son Sylvester Junior in the Robert McKimson shorts.
* The high-pitched yelling from the fleeing mice was re-used in "Kiddin' the Kitten" (when the kitten chases the mice out of the house), "Kiss Me Cat" (when the mice family runs away from a "magnified" Pussyfoot) and "Forward March Hare" (when the soldiers run for cover as Bugs uses an ammunition shell to nail his calendar to a wall). Interestingly Kiss Me Cat also depicts the cats as the heroes and the mice as the villains rather than vice-versa, much like this short. The former was directed by McKimson, while the latter two were also directed by Jones.
*This is the final short to use the 1941-1945 opening theme in the Blue Ribbon reissue, as well as the final Blue Ribbon reissue to axe out the original technical credits. Subsequent reissues after that would survive their original technical credits.
* This the only short to pair Porky Pig and Sylvester to get reissued.
* The killer mice resembling Hubie and Bertie from this cartoon would later reappear in The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries episode "Curse of De Nile", where this time they all have brown fur instead of grey fur, and are depicted as Egyptian killer mice. In this said episode, Sylvester is aware of the danger, and frequently saves Granny, Tweety and Hector from the dangers despite how oblivious the three are to the danger they're in, similar in vein to this short.
== Gallery ==
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ScaredyCatCredits2.png
25396220 10159768159670578 9062096511884314338 n.jpg|Lobby card
File:D82062ac71a4098d1dc42770deda9479.jpg|Layout/Poses
File:Scaredy Cat (1948) - Shadow.jpg
File:Scaredy Cat (1948) - Very Scared Cat.png
File:Scaredy Cat (1948) - Scared Cat.png
== References ==
Category:1948
Category:Cartoons directed by Chuck Jones
Category:Porky Pig Cartoons
Category:Sylvester Cartoons
Category:Shorts
Category:Blue Ribbon reissues
Category:Merrie Melodies Shorts
Category:Looney Tunes Shorts
Category:Cartoons written by Michael Maltese
Category:Cartoons with layouts by Robert Gribbroek
Category:Cartoons with backgrounds by Peter Alvarado
Category:Cartoons with characters voiced by Mel Blanc
Category:Cartoons with music by Carl W. Stalling
Category:Cartoons with orchestrations by Milt Franklyn
Category:Cartoons with film editing by Treg Brown
Category:Cartoons with sound effects edited by Treg Brown
Category:Cartoons produced by Eddie Selzer
Category:Cartoons animated by Abe Levitow
Category:Re-released cartoons whose original titles are known to exist