Pam’s Pictorama Post: This little fellow showed up recently in a package for me along with two other cat contributions as a gift from our friend cartoon artist and Zorro enthusiast Pete Poplaski. Pete stopped by to see us recently, one of the first of our traveling friends to return to visiting the beaten path here at Deitch Studio in New York City, as he makes his way on regular stops triangulating between France, Wisconsin and other locations along the Eastern seaboard. (A nice brief bio of Pete by Robert Crumb can be found here.)

Seeing him made us feel like the world was that much closer, if not exactly to our past lives, at least a version of the new world that included seeing friends again.

Pete is wonderfully comfortable to have around. He is not the sort of person I need to pick up around the apartment for and he and Kim happily and readily settle into picking up long conversations about everything from the film locations that a certain early Western was shot in, to art and philosophy. Pete and Kim have a book and film exchange that extends over the periods between Pete’s visits, but occasionally result in packages exchanged back and forth.

On his most recent visit Pete gave me a heads up that he had some cats for me (yea!) and the package showed up several weeks later. Of the three cats it contained this was the one I found the most intriguing.

For all of my toy cat searching I have not come across him previously. He reminds me very much of the Cab Calloway ghost character in the Betty Boop and Koko the Clown cartoon which features Cab singing St. James Infirmary Blues. I imagine that at one time he could be bent into various poses, but those days of pliability are gone. His back is stamped Made in China. While he certainly isn’t a straightforward Felix I would think he could be called Felix influenced.

He reminds me of a litany of toys that passed through my hands as a small child. These toys are a kissing cousin to the articulated cat above, a purchase awhile back in a large haul from my friends at Curiosities Antiques down in Texas. (I have written about them before and one of those posts can be found here and their website here.)

They have put together several cat packages for me and this fellow was in one buy. Like Pete’s gift, I am afraid to ask his aging joins to do any of the tricks my childhood self would have asked of them. However both bring back memories of long hours of contented play as a small child. Lost in a toy world of my own making and one I continue to celebrate here at Pictorama.