Unfiltered: Chapter 3 Fritz the Cat

Excerpts from 'UNFILTERED: The Complete Ralph Bakshi by Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnell Foreword by Quentin Tarantino Afterword by Ralph Bakshi

First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Universe Publishing: A Division of Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. (not all pages included)

'Ralph’s joy expired as fast as it came.

Spider-Man was an endless, thankless assembly line. After months of the same, Ralph just stopped caring.

TV animation, with its constant deadlines and subservience, wasn’t brazen enough to get him going, and by the end of the 60s, theatricals were rotting corpses. As little projects trickled in at Ralph’s Spot, a newly formed boutique division of the company, his patience waned. A few Peter Max-designed Coca-Cola commercials weren’t enough to elevate his mood, and a series of five-minute educational shorts paid for by Encyclopedia Britannica called Max the Mouse were throwaways.'

“What bothers me about animation and the heat that I took for my R- and- X-rated films is why anybody would spend their whole lives doing the same thing over and over again; how artists don’t grow; how if you’re a cartoonist you have to continue to grow, to evolve,” Ralph says with a tinge of irritation. “My great joy was doing the animated features — learning from them, and from live-action, photography, painters. "

"It may have been the pressure of those multiple roles — but mostly just some youthful cockiness — that led to Ralph’s first ballsy move: To make the first few minutes of footage the kinkiest, craziest, rawest of all — the aforementioned junkyard scene, where Fritz wanders to Harlem, gets high with Big Bertha, gets laid (to the cue of Billie Holiday’s “Yesterdays”), then incites a revolution. The plan, just in case: If funding got pulled, the whole Harlem sequence could be finished as a fifteen-minute short. At least that’s what Krantz was thinking, even though Ralph would never settle for a few measly scenes.

“I wasn’t stupid,” Ralph blurts. “Krantz wasn’t paying attention to whatI was doing. I wanted to show him exactly the kind of picture I was making, because he wasn’t even sure he wanted his name on it as producer at first. He was executive producing from a distance. That’s why I picked that part in the picture; I didn’t give a shit about making a short.” Krantz figured Warner Bros. would be unruffled; Ralph thought it poetic, a scene symbolic of the very animation uprising the studio was heralding in.

The reaction from Warner Bros.? Stone-faced silence."

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