First down, eight to go...
"Satan's Waitin'" is a 1954 Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Friz Freleng and starring Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird.
In this one, Sylvester is chasing Tweety around a building, until he plunges over the edge to his death. But it turns out that cats have nine lives, so Sylvester has eight more to go. The Devil, who wants Sylvester for good, then encourages him to chase after Tweety, getting Sylvester killed over and over again.
"Satan's Waitin'" provides examples of:
- And I Must Scream: In Hell, Sylvester's eternal torment is a pit of fire, full of demonic bulldogs.
- Black Comedy: The whole gist of this cartoon is that Sylvester dies. Nine times. In very hilarious ways.
- Bowdlerization: When this cartoon aired on CBS in the 1970s and 1980s, the last two of Sylvester's deaths were edited:
- The death where he slams into the rollercoaster tunnel.
- The last death where he locks himself in a bank vault and gets blown up by two incompetent bank robbers during a nighttime heist. In other words, the cartoon ends when, after the Devil tells Sylvester to go after Tweety again, the cat instead runs off, yelling, "No! I don't want him! I DOOOOON'T WANT HIM!"
- Another CBS edit added stock footage from "Pappy's Puppy" as an alternative ending. When Sylvester declares he does not want Tweety as described in the above previous, it next shows Sylvester's purgatory becoming a bulldog puppy's chew-toy "playmate" under the watch of the pup's dad Butch.
- Cats Are Mean: There's no real explanation for what Sylvester has done that's destined him for Hell once he expends his nine lives, aside from chasing Tweety, something presumably any other cat would do too.
- Cats Have Nine Lives: So Sylvester has to die nine times for the Devil to get him for good.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Sylvester falls off a building, gets crushed by a steamroller, scared to death in a funhouse, shot multiple times in a shooting gallery, slams into a low-clearance entrance of a roller-coaster tunnel, and finally killed in an explosion.
- Diabolus ex Machina: Sylvester, on his last life, gives up chasing Tweety and moves into a bank vault, taking a large supply of canned cat food with him. That night, he is killed by two bank robbers (who are also killed) after one of them, Mugsy, uses too much explosive trying to blow the vault open.
- Explosive Stupidity: Mugsy overestimates the amount of dynamite needed to blow open the bank vault, and blows himself, his accomplice, and Sylvester's final regeneration to smithereens.
- Fire and Brimstone Hell: For Sylvester, the pit of torment is a bunch of barking demonic bulldogs, and the whole thing is reached by taking a down escalator.
- Fright Deathtrap: Sylvester has one of his lives literally scared out of him after he chases Tweety into an amusement park's haunted house.
- Hellevator: An escalator, actually, takes Sylvester to hell.
- Journey to the Underworld: Sylvester makes multiple trips as he loses lives.
- Lucky Seven: When Sylvester loses his second life and is down to seven, the Devil, in urging Sylvester to keep after Tweety, points out to him that he is lucky because he has seven lives left. "And seven's a lucky number."Sylvester: Yeah, seven's my lucky number!
- Now You Tell Me: A thoroughly dejected Sylvester utters a variation of the line when hearing one of the robbers tell Mugsy he "used too much" nitro.
- Post-Mortem One-Liner: As the two burglars followed by Sylvester's final life are entering Hell, one burglar states that his partner used too much explosives, to which Sylvester grumbles, "Now he tells him!" at which the cartoon irises out.
- Rooftop Confrontation: Sylvester chases Tweety to the top of a building. Sylvester falls off.
- Satan: Here he appears as Hector the bulldog, one of Sylvester's frequent tormentors.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Sylvester pulls this twice.
- The first is after losing his first life. He decides that Tweety is not worth the trouble. Of course, Devil Hector is able to coax him into continuing the chase.
- The second is when he is down to his last life. Again, Hector tries to coax him, only this time, Sylvester is utterly insistent.
- Shooting Gallery: Sylvester loses four lives in quick succession when he gets stuck in one of these.
- Squashed Flat: How Sylvester meets one of his deaths, when he's run over by a steamroller.
- Stairway to Heaven: When Sylvester first dies, he sees two escalators, a golden one to Heaven and a red one to Hell. The escalator to Heaven is roped off as if it is signifying to Sylvester that he is not welcome there.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: Happens every time Sylvester bites it.
