16. The Pink Panther Show (1969-1980)
Blake Edwards’ 1963 live-action feature The Pink Panther isn’t about a panther, pink or otherwise: It’s about bumbling French police inspector Jacques Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers) and a famous gemstone with a panther-shaped flaw. But the movie’s animated opening credits, produced by David H. DePatie and Friz Freleng, featured a languid, sleepy-eyed, cool cat playing with the titles and slinking around to Henry Mancini’s famous theme, and the character was an instant hit. The next year, MGM and DePatie-Freleng’s production company started making Pink Panther theatrical shorts, and by 1969, the character had his own show—an echo of Jay Ward’s anarchic Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, which launched a decade earlier. Like Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Pink Panther Show was an anthology of unrelated cartoons, some featuring the Pink Panther—a lanky, eternally silent galoot who frequently pulled surreal tricks on a short-tempered foil called the Little Man, or Big Nose—and others focusing on a clear Clouseau take-off called The Inspector. Later iterations of the show added an aardvark based on comedian Jackie Mason chasing an ant modeled after Dean Martin, and a pair of toads from Tijuana. All these cartoons had the same sort of low-key, antic feel and minimalist but stylish DePatie-Freleng visuals, a sort of antidote to the minimalist and generic Hanna-Barbera cartoons and the mania of Looney Tunes animation. There was always a genial, in-jokey feel about the Pink Panther cartoons, and a Little Tramp feel to the character himself: Frequently broke and down on his luck, but endlessly genial and creative in finding solutions, the Pink Panther carved out a distinctive niche among other surreal troublemakers largely by being a calm adult figure amid chaos, instead of a wisecracking eternal kid. [Tasha Robinson]