YMMV / Felix the Cat (Joe Oriolo)

YMMV Tropes for the Joe Oriolo / Don Oriolo Felix Cartoons and Comics

• Anticlimax Boss: King Gulpo in "Felix Babysits". The setup is that Poindexter, after restoring Felix to his original size from under the microscope, unwittingly gets some of it on the evil amoeba that was hounding Felix. It goes from bad to worse when Gulpo drinks more of the same growth formula, making him big enough to barely fit in the Professor's lab. It seems like it'd be a good setup for a climatic fight, but Felix easily defeats him just seconds afterward by throwing Poindexter's shrinking formula (which got Felix into this mess in the first place) at the behemoth, reducing Gulpo back to his original microscopic size.
• Ass Pull: The Professor's airplane abruptly coming to life and turning against him in the ending of The Professors Committed No Crime!.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: There are a lot of Felix fans who absolutely hate this adaptation of the character and how it has become the most well known incarnation of the series. They feel that it has painted the average viewer's perception of Felix as a bland Mickey Mouse clone and a obnoxiously cheerful, patronizing boy-scout in contrast to his rascally Anti-Hero personality in the groundbreaking Otto Messmer cartoons. They also feel that this version is only worth watching to make fun of its rock bottom production values and asinine stories and writing. Notably, the team working on The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat considered it the series' Audience-Alienating Era and intentionally wanted to avoid using anything from the Joe Oriolo cartoons. The team only relented because Don Oriolo insisted on at least including the Magic Bag of Tricks, and then forced a retool on the show to be more like his dad's show in the second season. When that happened, they wrote whole episodes taking snipes at the Oriolo cartoons in retaliation.
• Awesome Music: Having worked on the Van Beuren era Felix, Winston Sharples once again returned to compose for the series, and his dynamic musical scores are considered some of the best things about the cartoons. There's a reason he was nicknamed "The East Coast Carl Stalling!"
• Designated Hero: Felix unintentionally comes off as this in "Felix and Vavoom". While he's right to be angry at Professor and Rock for trying to off him and Vavoom, they were both perfectly in their right to take the diamonds, which didn't belong to anybody. Felix even steals their diamonds in the end once Vavoom throttles them.
  • In "The Magic Bag", Felix trespasses onto the Professor's property, in spite of the signs saying "Private Property", and steals an apple from his apple tree. This almost makes the Professor's animosity towards him seem justified.
• Edited for Syndication: In the original broadcasts, each episode was split into two parts with a cliff hanger at mid point, and the narrator would say "What will happen to Felix in the next exciting adventure of Felix the Cat?" and in the next part, the theme song would play again before the second half (hence why each second half of an episode does a recap of the previous half). These parts were cut in the late 70's by tv stations trying to add more commercials. The DVD releases of the show use these syndicated edits.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the series recurring characters, Poindexter, is a kid scientist who has Dexter as (part) of his name...
• Memetic Loser: The Professor is one in and out of universe, simply because he's such a pathetic villain who is doomed to always lose to Felix and get his butt handed to him either by the cat, his own hand, or just sheer bad luck. There's a reason he's considered one of the poster childs for both Harmless Villain and Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
• Nightmare Retardant: Sure, Master Cylinder looks like a cool, threatening character, but his stilted, wheezy old man voice makes it impossible to take him seriously as a villain.
• Newer Than They Think: The Professor's nephew Poindexter is actually the progenitor of the term "poindexter" being a synonym for "geek" or "nerd"!
• Rooting for the Empire: Professor and Rock Bottom may be crooks who give Felix and others grief, but they're so hopelessly pitiful and unsuccessful (to where Felix has a 0 to 1 victory streak against them) and have so much more personality than the series' very bland, goody two shoes take on Felix, that you can't help but feel sorry for them both at times, since Felix basically lives to make their lives miserable and has the deck stacked against them, both because of the Magic Bag of Tricks and because the law is always on his side. It could be argued that they're the actual protagonists of the series since they're almost always the ones setting the plot into motion.
• So Bad, It's Good: Between the ultra low budget and clearly rushed animation and frequent bloopers, stilted voice acting and cheesy as Limburger writing, and stories that range from asinine to downright bizarre, this incarnation of Felix is mainly liked by fans for either nostalgic value or for a cheap laugh.
• Values Dissonance: The Joe Oriolo cartoons are comparatively very free of this compared to the silent cartoons, but the stereotypical use of "Indians" in some of the episodes (i.e. "Felix Out West") definitely wouldn't fly in contemporary cartoons either.

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