Dr. Jerkyl's Hide

Fun Sylvester short directed by Friz Freleng, in many ways a remake of Freleng's earlier Sylvester short Tree for Two. In that cartoon, Sylvester is on the run from a pair of dogs (bullying bulldog Spike and his mouthy sidekick Chester, who eggs him on constantly) at the same time a panther has escaped from the zoo. So what follows is a series of bits where Sylvester hides in an alley where the panther also happens to be hiding. Every time Spike goes down the alley looking to beat up Sylvester, he is mauled by the panther instead. So here we have Sylvester also on the run from a British version of Spike and Chester (although Spike is named Alfie here for some reason). But in this short Sylvester drinks Dr. Jerkyl's potion and every time Spike tries to beat him up, Sylvester transforms into Mr. Hyde and easily kicks the crap out of the bulldog. So a little is changed but it's basically the same cartoon.

Much like John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a constant source of parody for the animators at Warner Bros. In fact, Friz Freleng did three such cartoons himself, this being the first. It's fun for what it is but if you've seen the prior short, it will probably suffer by comparison. If there's one negative I can point to, it would be the voice work of the usually excellent Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg. They're both doing British accents and, frankly, they're pretty bad. Freberg's seems to be half Brit and half Australian I think. At any rate it's not the best work either of these legends did.