"This time, we DIDN'T forget the gravy" (and other vicious cartoons)

[alcibiades_mystery]

The cartoon is Chuck Jones' "Chow Hound," a now impossible to find Warner Brother's classic. The plot goes something like this: Butch, a very butch bulldog has more or less enslaved Harold, a passive cat, and a small mouse companion. Butch is a hungry dog, and so exploits Harold through various schemes to procure meat for himself. In the first half, Harold and the mouse are forced to function as a break-and-enter team, burglarizing people's homes for meat. They are often successful in this endeavor, and are forced to bring all the meat to Butch. Invariably, Butch is angered, because no gravy is brought to accompany his meat. He intones viciously:

"What? No gravy?"

And he proceeds to beat Harold and the mouse. Again and again this happens: "What, no gravy?" then the beatings. Then Butch has a bright idea. He can return Harold as a lost cat to various people offering rewards. He shows up at the door with Harold in a baby basket, hands it over, collects the money, then yanks Harold violently out through a trap door in the basket's bottom so that the scheme can be repeated. Soon, Butch has amassed a small fortune through this fraudulent return scheme, enough to buy himself a butcher shop and never have to worry about meat again. Of course, since Butch is a greedy and selfish dog, he eats his way through the butcher shop meat too fast, leaving him giant, unable to move, and sent to the animal hospital for severe over-eating.

As we enter the final scene, we find Bush on a medical table, his belly swollen to 20 times its usual size, appearing for all the world that another morsel will cause him to explode. That's the moral, right? Wrong. Because we cut immediately to the door opening, and there are Harold and his mouse companion, carrying - gasp! - a 60 gallon drum marked simply GRAVY....and a giant funnel. Uh-oh. Harold places the funnel into hapless Butch's mouth, all while his little arms and legs flail helplessly, and he pleads "No, no, no, no!" They set up a ladder from which to pour the gravy into the funnel. "No, no, no, no!" And Harold sneers, in the hardest revenge scenario ever witnessed on children's television:

"This time, we DIDN'T forget the gravy..."

Fade to black.

You will never see a cartoon like this again. In fact, Warner Brothers refused to release it on their classics DVD, and had it pulled from YouTube almost as soon as it went up. And yet this cartoon was brilliant in its depiction of power and revenge, and may have even had something to say about class struggle. I saw this cartoon numerous times as a five year-old, and appreciated its dark humor then. My brothers and I used to say "This time we didn't forget the gravy" all the time. I think it's a bit sad that kids today don't get that true viciousness that was mid-twentieth century cartoons (they played well into the 80's). Other vicious cartoons?