Western Animation / The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat

The Cat Returned.

Fly: Whats going on down there?
Spider: It's that Felix the Cat show, you know it's like a wacky goof parade.
Fly: Oh.
Spider: I'm gonna eat you now.
Fly: Really? I'm shocked.

—The entire series summed up in a nutshell, from "Surreal Estate"

The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat is a 1990's take on the classic Felix the Cat series, being an attempt to return the series back to its roots after decades of using the 1950s Joe Oriolo portrayal of Felix.

The series is very kooky, surreal and fast paced-as a whole, owing a lot to cartoons from The Silent Age of Animation and The Golden Age of Animation, especially the surreal works of Max and Dave Fleischer.

Unfortunately, the series lasted only 21 episodes.^note Technically there were 55, as each show was usually split into three shorts, with a couple two parter episodes. Originally aired from 1995-1997 on CBS' Saturday morning block in America. Other countries have aired this show on overseas cable channels (mostly any Nickelodeon or Viacom-based kids' network). Later Felix productions (namely the Spinoff Babies series Baby Felix & Friends and the 2004 film Felix the Cat Saves Christmas) largely ignored the Twisted Tales continuity & art style.

As of July 2020, both seasons are streaming on Peacock.

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Tropes This Series Provides Examples Of:

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: In one part of the opening.
  Felix: Computer animation. Big deal!
• 30 Minutes, or It's Free!: "Five Minute Meatball" had Felix charged with delivering a meatball in 5 minutes or it was free, complete with a continually running timer in the corner of the screen. When he just barely makes it in time, the customer's wife expresses her desire for a meatball of her own, and the countdown clock gives a nasty chuckle as it starts without even letting Felix get back to retrieve the meatball.
• Actually Pretty Funny: In "The Punderground", the king of the island Mirthless outlaws puns, but repeals the law when Felix tricks him into making a pun and he realizes that puns aren't so bad.
• All Just a Dream: "Gross Ghost" and "The Milky Way" end with the revelations that Felix and Roscoe in the former, and just Felix in the latter, dreamed the whole episode.
• All Men Are Perverts: In "Step Right Up", Peking Duck tries to get Felix distracted from his magic bag of tricks using balloon animals. He doesn't get his attention until he makes a balloon shaped like a curvaceous woman.
• Ambiguously Gay: The sphinx in "Petrified Cheese". He speaks with a lisp and even describes his replacement nose as "fabulous".
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The jail in "The Punderground".
  "I robbed twenty-seven banks and thirty-two gas stations."
  "I stole seventy-three cars and ninety-one million dollars in gold and jewels."
  "Uh, I made a pun."
• Ascended Extra: Poindexter went from having a brief cameo appearance in Season 1's "News Blues" to a recurring character in Season 2.
• Awesome Backpack: Felix's "bag of tricks" can transform into just about anything Felix can imagine.
• Badass Adorable: Once again, Felix the Cat.
• Bag of Holding: Any time Felix needs an item, he will "bag of tricks" and pull out exactly what he needs.
• Balloon Belly:
  • Felix gets one after drinking the flood in "Noah's Nightclub". He returns to normal after a trip to the restroom.
  • He also gets one after eating too many dairy products in "The Milky Way."
  • He swells up again in "The Maltese Milkshake" when he slurps up all the ice cream and milk in the Fat Man's giant blender, using his fat to protect himself from getting blended. He later spits all the milk and ice cream out to wash away the Fat Man's henchmen, returning him to his normal size.
• Bankruptcy Barrel: In "Mars Needs Felix", Felix at one point accidentally removes the hide of a cow, exposing her underwear. The cow then covers herself by putting on a barrel.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: The second season had a lot of this due to the staff's dislike of the retool. "The Fuzzy Bunny Show" in particular is basically a big middle finger to then-series owner Don Oriolo.
• Body Horror: Felix going through several stages of devolution in "Space Time Twister".
• Born Lucky: Bet-A-Billion Bill, whose entire life is fixated on gambling because he never loses. And then this all turns upside down once Felix crosses his path...
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Very often, jokes will involve characters pointing out that they are in a cartoon or using that fact to their advantage, like when Felix borrows white-out from the episode's animator in "Middle-Aged Felix".
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Felix's tail can turn into a mallet and smash things, unfortunately for his noisy sentient alarm clock.
• The Bus Came Back: When Season 2 shifted to make the series more in vogue with the Joe Oriolo Felix the Cat cartoons, several characters from it were brought back. The Professor and Rock Bottom, two major characters from the original Tv Felix cartoons, return for the episode "Attack of the Robot Rat". Pointdexter, the professors nephew, also started making recurring appearances, and the Master Cylinder returns for one episode.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Scenes taking place in the dark always depict the characters' eyes as the only thing visible.
• Call-Back: In "Heart of Tin", Felix sends Master Cylinder packing by turning his Magic Bag into a can opener and threatening him with him. Long time fans of the Trans-Lux cartoons will recognize this as a reference to "Felix and the Mid-Evil Ages", where Felix scared off Professor's metal horse by turning his bag into a can opener.
• Canon Welding: The series combines the style of the original Felix shorts (with the bizarre, surreal atmosphere and Felix's mischievous jokester personality) and several of the characters and props from 1950s series (such as Poindexter and the bag of tricks).
• Captain Obvious: Poindexter, as shown in "Star Trash".
  Felix: Vacuum and dump!
  Poindexter: It appears to be a vacuum and dump control.
  Felix: We need to get a better genius.
• Carnivore Confusion: During the "Meat Song" in "Guardian Idiot", the demon butcher is seen serving pork to a family of pigs.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Ratzenheimmer!"
  • (acknowledging the increasing surreality of the situation) "This is too stupid!"
• Classically-Trained Extra: The two worms that Felix is trying to catch and feed to Slimo in "Shell Shock".
  "We're not worms, I tell you! We're actors!"
• Comically Missing the Point: In "The Maltese Milkshake", when the fat man is revealed to really be Felix's overweight secretary, she admits that she sneezes in Felix's coffee. Felix states that he was shocked by this because he always thought his secretary spat in his coffee.
• Continuity Nod: "Big Deal" animation studio from "The Sludge King" makes a brief reappearance in "Phony Phelix".
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Peking Duck only got one mention in "Dueling Whiskers", but is otherwise absent in Season 2.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: "Black Magic Bag" begins with Roscoe being held hostage by the moon. When Felix asks Roscoe what he did to get the moon so angry, Roscoe answers that he told the moon "his face looked (lengthy bleep censor)".
• Covert Pervert: Sheba when she spots the NY Giants players in the locker room in "Forever Rafter". She expresses her delight at seeing the players in there altogether.
• Denser and Wackier: The show is much more comedic and surreal than the Joe Oriolo era Felix cartoons.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The old man who wanted a meatball in "Five Minutwe Meatball" tended to reiterate this several times per sentence.
• Did Not Get the Girl: No matter how hard he tries, Felix will never win Candy's affections, not even in his dreams.
• Digital Destruction: Sadly, Peacock ended up getting the PAL masters for the series when they began streaming it. Besides the slightly higher speed and audio pitch, it's very obvious that these masters haven't been maintained well. The first episode, for starters, looks so incredibly fuzzy that it almost looks like it was taken from a VHS tape, and a few episodes have visible (though thankfully brief) tape damage. It's highly plausible that, given the obscurity of the show, these were the only masters NBCUniversal could find in their archives.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "The Punderground", Felix is thrown in a dungeon on a sentence of a thousand years because he made a pun.
• The Ditz:
  • Roscoe isn't all that bright. The visual gags of his brain sleeping or kicking him in the head while he's thinking in "The Sludge King" are pretty telling.
  • The Bermuda Triangle in "Manhattan Triangle" is a big guffawing moron.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: When the magic bag gets stolen in "Viva Lost Wages", Felix acts as if he's lost his wife. (Complete with angst about having to sleep alone, a wallet full of romantic photos of Felix and the bag together, and the line, "I never should have taken it for granted!")
• Double Take: Felix does this in "Black Magic Bag" after Roscoe flies by with his hand stuck in a knockoff magic bag and they casually say "hi" to each other.
• Dream Sequence: Felix deliberately initiates one in "The Maltese Milkshake" by looking for a way to get knocked out, in a probable Shout-Out to The Great Piggy Bank Robbery.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Felix can be heard humming to himself in two episodes, Felix is heard humming a beautiful tune while using the vacuum in "The Manhattan Triangle", later, he is seen heard humming the Felix the Cat theme while turning his tail into a banana in "The Fuzzy Bunny Show".
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Master Cylinder can be seen on the back of a book Felix reads in "Nightmare on Oak Street" before making a full appearance in "Heart of Tin".
• Easily Forgiven: In "Shocking Story", a worn-out lightning bolt low on power stays in Felix's house and eats all of Felix's (sentient) appliances, except for the TV, while Felix is out shopping. When Felix gets back, he simply hits the lightning bolt until it coughs everything up. Felix's TV is less than thrilled.
  "That's all he's gonna get is a whooping? TENANT MEETING! RIGHT NOW!"
• Easy Impersonation: Mostly averted in "Phony Phelix". Oscar obviously looks different from Felix because he's taller, thinner, has a huge blue nose, and is missing a tail. Everyone sees through the deception except for Roscoe. Then again, Roscoe's not very bright.
• Eat the Camera: Around midpoint in the opening credits, Peeking Duck shouts, "SHOWTIME!" The scene transitions to a bunch of xylophones.
• Evil Counterpart: In "Nightmare on Oak Street," Jeepers Creepers creates an evil version of Felix to fight Felix and Roscoe. The evil Felix is all white in contrast to Felix's black-and-white, and his Bag of Tricks is black with yellow patterns in contrast to Felix's yellow bag with black patterns.
• Exact Words: In "Step Right Up", one of the attractions Felix sees is known as "the man who lives under water". While the poster suggests a merman, he turns out to be a man with a fish bowl on his head.
• Expospeak Gag: From the episode "Star Trash".
  Poindexter: It appears, Mr Felix, that an extraterrestrial expedition has designated our planetary body as a locale for jettisonable waste materials…Mr. Felix?
  Felix: (playing a video game on Poindexter's computer) Huh?
  Poindexter: Aliens are using Earth as a trash can!
• Expressive Mask: In "Order of the Black Cats," the Black Cats are all people in costumes, yet their masks move just like real faces.
• Fat Bastard:
  • Rat Masterson from "Felix's Gold Score" is very heavyset and he tries to kill Felix for ruining his drink, even when Felix offers to buy him a new one.
  • The Fat Man, an infamous criminal mastermind in "The Maltese Milkshake." He turns out to be Felix's secretary, who is equally overweight, in disguise. Felix even makes a crack about the Fat Man's weight:
    Felix: It's not pretty when the rotund go bad.
• Fantastic Aesop: "Black Magic Bag" ends with Felix delivering a PSA-style announcement to the audience to "make sure this never happens again":
  "So remember, kids, if someone offers you a magic bag, just tell 'em, 'No, thanks! I'm savin' up my money for an edible wig!' And that's one to grow on!"
• Fantastically Indifferent: How Felix answers the phone in "Nightmare on Oak Street".
  Felix: (bored monotone) "Felix the cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat..."
• For the Evulz: Peking Duck doesn't have any motivation for his misdeeds other than to be a dick for the sake of it.
• Funny Background Event: "Guardian Idiot" has a very Black Comedy-based one. In the first interior shot of the meat restaurant, in the background, you can see a woman sitting at a table with a boy. The boy is just sitting there while the woman wolfs down several hamburgers (actually, it's just the same animation of her eating two hamburgers looped a few times, but you get the idea.) Eventually, she eats all the hamburgers. Then she eats the plate. Then she eats the boy.
• Gainax Ending: "Noah's Nightclub" ends with Felix and the other characters turning out to be bath toys owned by a little girl.
• The Gambling Addict: Felix meets one named Billy in "Bet A Billion Bill". Billy lost his luck because of this, since Felix is a black cat that crossed his path. Billy even begged Felix to "uncross" his path. Which Felix did. Felix, however, kept crossing Billy's path, eventually sending him to the poorhouse. Later on in "Viva Lost Wages", Billy steals Felix's magic bag, hoping it'll restore his luck. Billy has been winning bets since then, which made him the (probably) only person who managed to steal the bag and use it. Felix eventually confronted Billy, who had a security guard throw Felix away. Felix then challenged Billy for a bet with the bag at stake. Felix then picked two dice and told Billy he could get any number he wants from them. Billy then called "13". Felix protested the biggest number he could get was "12" but Billy insisted with "13". Felix soon had an idea: he got the dot from the exclamation mark that came with the idea and added it to the six-dot face of one of the die, turning it into a seven-dot face and then threw the dice, obtaining "13". As soon as Billy lost the bag, he lost his new fortune.
• Genre Savvy: As always, Felix frequently uses the surreality of his animated universe to his advantage. In one episode, he uses a remote to go back in time by rewinding the episode to a point when he could have watched a CGI version of the cartoon he's in and seen the ending, thus understanding how to get out of his difficulty. (If you had a hard time following that, you're clearly not savvy enough to inhabit this particular universe.)
• Genre Throwback: The series as a whole is one big love letter after the next to classic cartoons.
• Gesundheit: In "Felix in Psychedelicland":
  Sheba: Whoa. Escher!
  Felix: Gesundheit.
• G-Rated Mental Illness: The Talkative Loon asylum-escapee frog.
• Group Hug: Felix with Slimo the Slug and the two worms at the end of "Shell Shock". And note that it's a really weird place for a group hug, since Slimo is about to eat the worms.
  Felix: Aww! Hugs all around, ya slobs!
• Guardian Angel: An especially inept one watches over Felix in Guardian Idiot, he saves Felix from danger multiple times only to put him in the midst of another terrible situation. Though to his credit, the angel eventually manages to weaponize his stupidity to actually save Felix in the end.
• Hall of Mirrors: Peking Duck and his sumo chicken sidekicks chase Felix through one of these in "Step Right Up".
• Halloween Episode: "Order of the Black Cats" takes place during Halloween.
• Here We Go Again!:
  • The episode "Order of the Cats" has Felix accidentally get involved with a cult of people dressed as black cats. After he ends up crowned their king, he later encounters a bunch of kings trying to recruit him to their organization.
  • In "Five Minute Meatball", Felix succeeds in delivering the meatball to the elderly couple before the five minutes are up, but then has to go back and deliver the woman a meatball when she decides she needs one, too.
• High-School Hustler: Back when he attended High School, Bet-a-Billion-Bill used to run a gambling ring at school and win everything his classmates ever waged.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Butcher in "Guardian Idiot," who tries to drop Felix into a meat grinder to get more meat for his restaurant, ends up being dropped into the meat grinder himself. However, instead of being horrifically shredded to bits, he is simply transformed into a living sausage with his face on it.
• Hostile Show Takeover:
  • "The Fuzzy Bunny Show" is centered on Felix getting fired by his network and immediately being replaced by a new cutesy pie preschooler cartoon, the eponymous Fuzzy Bunny Show.
  • In "Phony Felix", a very obvious Felix impersonator named Oscar kidnaps Felix and tries to take over his show just so he can be the cartoon star he had failed to be in the past.
• Hulk Speak: Peking Duck's minion One-Ton speaks in incomplete sentences and refers to himself in third person in "The Big Hunt".
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: A noticeable tic in Shamus H. Gold's speech pattern. And then there's this:
  Duck: Step right up! See human oddities! The unusually inclined! The normality...challenged!
  Felix: Oh boy, freaks!
• Hurricane of Puns: The episode "The Punderground" is about an island where puns are illegal and La Résistance is full of punsters.
• I Am Not Weasel: In "Black Magic Bag", Felix is mistaken by a woman for a squirrel and a raccoon.
• I Call Her "Vera": In "Viva Lost Wages", we find out that Felix calls the magic bag "Baggie".
• Identical Stranger: In "Step Right Up", one of the sideshow attractions is a "Talking Cat". Said talking cat is a ringer for Felix, except with a depressed-sounding Surfer Dude voice.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: The lounge singer of Noah's Nightclub has perhaps the most voluptuous figure in the whole cartoon. Especially impressive given she is a bird.
• Kevlard: In "The Maltese Milkshake," the Fat Man puts Felix in a giant blender before slowly filling it with milk and ice cream, intending to turn Felix into a milkshake. Felix consumes all the milk and ice cream in the blender, giving himself a massive Balloon Belly. When the blender's blades come down, they press against Felix's belly, having no effect other than spinning him around until he is thrown out of the blender.
• Killed Off for Real: The two worms get eaten by Slimo at the end of "Shell Shock".
• Lame Pun Reaction: In "The Punderground", the King of Mirthless punishes those who make bad puns by throwing them in his castle dungeon until the very end of the episode, where he finds that puns are Actually Pretty Funny.
• Large Ham:
  • Felix's TV in "Shocking Story" doesn't seem to grasp the concept of an indoor voice and makes a scene over how easy the sentient lightning bolt got off over eating Felix's electrical appliances.
  • Felix is also this due to his rascally, comical personality in this series, especially in Season 2, where he is voiced by Charlie Adler.
• Laugh Track: Thrown in to emphasize all the puns Felix makes in "The Punderground".
• Let's Meet the Meat: Just about every object in this show is animated. It doesn't seem disturbing, until one episode had Felix as a meatball deliveryman. And the meatball spoke, and had eyes, and seemed very comfortable in entering a plate full of spaghetti. Also, there's The Meat Song from "Guardian Idiot" may be the single most disturbing example of this trope ever.
• Literal Genie: Felix's guardian angel in "Guardian Idiot" keeps either misinterpreting people's requests or taking them too literally. For example, when Felix says he wants to go on a cruise, the angel teleports him onto a sunken ship. When Felix says he wants to return to dry land, the angel teleports him to the middle of a desert. This is taken to the extreme later on when the Butcher asks the angel to "make me the fattest, greasiest sausage in the world!" The angel teleports the Butcher right above his meat grinder. The Butcher falls in and gets transformed into a living sausage.
• Living Shadow: Felix's shadow is shown to have a mind of its own. For example they fight over a coin in the beginning of "The Sludge King".
• Losing Your Head: Felix's head falls off with no ill effects in "Shocking Story".
• Meat-O-Vision: At one point in "The Milky Way", Felix hallucinates everyone around him as bottles and cartons of milk while going crazy over the milk shortage.
• Monumental Theft: In "The Earth Heist", the entire planet Earth is deflated like a balloon and stolen by a giant spaceship belonging to an intergalactic repo company.
• Ms. Fanservice: Candy Kitty, Roscoe's sister, is a very shapely woman and is occasionally subjected to Male Gaze.
• Mythology Gag:
  • "Swedish Meatballs" is loosely inspired by the Van Beuren era Felix cartoon "Neptune Nonsense", to the point that the original cartoon is shown on a TV, and is what sets the plot into motion—the villain thinks Felix is using the cartoon to promote fishing at the expense of the fishes' lives, even though the cartoon and Felix himself make it clear that he doesn't eat fish.
  • "The Petrified Cheese" ends with Felix the Cat standing there laughing, much like how a lot of episodes of the Trans-Lux television series ended.
  • In "Star Trash", Felix's address is 1920 Messmer Blvd.
• Nerd in Evil's Helmet: In "Order of the Black Cats," the leader of the Black Cats seems like a large, imposing figure with a deep voice, but when unmasked, he turns out to be a scrawny, balding, middle-aged-looking man with Nerd Glasses and a higher-pitched voice.
• No Fourth Wall: Felix and the gang are perfectly aware that they're cartoon characters.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: When Charlie Adler replaced Thom Adcox Hernandez as Felix's voice in season 2, he didn't even attempt to keep his performance consistent with Thom's youthful sounding voice (he basically uses the same voice he used for Chicken), making Felix sound like an entirely different character instead.
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: In "Nightmare on Oak Street", one of the nightmare scenarios Jeepers Creepers uses to torment Felix and Roscoe during his Villain Song has Felix and Roscoe being seen in public in their underwear. Rather odd considering that Felix usually walks around naked anyway.
• Older Than They Look: Invoked in "Comic Calamities" where Felix proudly shows off one of his original comics from the 1920's. He later expressed shock when Roscoe pointed out that this meant Felix was even older than that.
• Organ Theft: The hippie ghost in "Felix in Psychedelicland"sings "The flower girl will steal your heart! And your lungs! And possibly your liver, or your spleen, or your colon..." while the flower girl does exactly those things to Felix.
• Or Was It a Dream?: The episode "The Milky Way" has Felix get so frustrated with a milk shortage that he wishes to be sent to a world where he can get all the dairy products he wants. After his dairy godmother grants his wish, Felix eventually tires of the dairy products and knows it's unhealthy because he's gaining weight from all of it. After the dairy godmother begrudgingly sends Felix back, it appears that Felix dreams the whole thing, but he's then scared off by a milkman offering bottles of milk, who turns out to be the dairy godmother in disguise.
• Parachute Petticoat: In "Felix Breaks The Bank", when Candy is falling quickly, she comes to an abrupt stop for a moment, as a sudden draft up her skirt causes it to billow like a parachute. She manages to keep her skirt from rising any higher, as she looks at the camera and audience, giggles coyly and descends slowly, and safely.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Felix and Sheba are great friends, but show little romantic interest in each other. It helps that Sheba is a tomboy.
• Prehensile Tail: Felix's tail can wrap around stuff.
• Pie-Eyed: Pretty much everyone has pie-shaped eyes as a throwback to the Golden Age cartoons that Felix made his debut in. Lampshaded via dialogue in "The Sludge King":
  Felix: What a woman! Eyes like pies...
• Potty Emergency: Felix invokes this to escape from the titular antagonist of "The Sludge King". He tricks the Sludge King into drinking too much grog and takes the chance to leave with Roscoe when the villain leaves to use the bathroom.
• Power Perversion Potential: In the episode "Wet Paint", Felix at one point uses the 3-D paint to make an attractive woman for him to make out with.
• Pungeon Master: Felix is shown to be this in Season 2's "The Punderground", along with a secret underground society in the kingdom of Mirthless.
• Put on a Bus: A lot of the new characters from season 1, such as Peking Duck and Candy, were ordered to be scrapped from the second season due to orders from Don Oriolo, who wanted the focus to be put more on the Joe Oriolo era characters.
• Random Events Plot: Basically every episode has Felix go through unlikely events for no explicable reason. One notable case is in the episode "Mars Needs Felix", where he finds an ad offering free food in exchange for traveling the world and ends up on Mars, then has to run from babies trying to eat him.
• Retool: The second season pushed for much more linear storylines and less emphasis on visual surreal humor compared to Season 1.
• Riches to Rags: The episode "Bet a Billion Bill" featured a gambler named Billy. He was wealthy and lucky until a black cat (Felix) crossed his path. In "Viva Lost Wages", Billy stole Felix's magic bag and used it as a charm to regain his fortune. Once Felix recovered the bag, it didn't take long before Billy returned to the poorhouse.
• Ridiculous Repossession: In "Viva Lost Wages", Bet-a-Billion Bill steals Felix's magic bag so he can use it to win bets and become rich again. Right after Felix recovers the magic bag, Bill receives a phone call from the bank informing him that his investments failed, his oil wells dried up, and his lottery tickets awarded him no prizes, making him bankrupt again; and a repo man shows up to repossess his limousine, his yacht, his girl, his mansion (a giant crane removed it from the area) and his suit.
• Sanity Has Advantages: In "Viva Lost Wages", a gambler named Billy steals Felix's magic bag and uses it as a lucky charm to win bets. When Felix breaks into Billy's mansion to recover the bag, he's easily caught by a security guard. Billy could just have Felix thrown away but can't resist when Felix challenges him to settle their score with a bet. Felix points to a pair of dice and says he can get any number Billy calls. Subverted because Billy, not satisfied with the odds, calls 13 in spite of Felix's protests that the highest number one can get is 12. Fortunately, Felix has an idea: he gets the dot from the exclamation point that appeared with the idea and used it to turn a 6 into a 7. Felix eventually wins and reclaims his bag.
• Scooby-Dooby Doors: "Star Trash" has a scene of Felix and Poindexter running through different doors in improbable ways while trying to flee the Enterprise crew stand-ins.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • In the first part of "The Fuzzy Bunny Show", the show is (tellingly) referred to as The Not So Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.
  • In "Battle of the Brains", a dog newscaster goes on a rapid tangent on random tidbits. He then ends by reporting that dogs are allowed to say the news on the air like “stupid things, things a child would make up or a hack cartoon writer”.
  • At one point in "The Sludge King", Felix ridicules computer animation. It should be pointed out that the show's opening features CGI.
  • Pretty much the entirety of the episode "TV or Not TV" decries television as an inferior substitute to real life. The ending even has a baby watching the show call it stupid and decide to go the school instead of watching television.
• Serenade Your Lover: In "Viva Lost Wages", Felix looks at photos of himself and his bag in various romantic-looking scenes, one of which is the bag on a balcony and Felix beneath, playing a mandolin.
• Serious Business: "Surreal Estate" has Felix's toaster breaking down and him having to buy another. Whenever he mentions "toaster", a crowd of crazy costumers appears to take away all of them.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: The black magic bags mass-produced in "The Black Magic Bag". When some of the materials indentified as being part of the original bag are discovered to be very expensive, they were replaced with cheap ones under the belief the customers would never know. To replace the non-identified materials, they used cheap ones under the belief nobody cared.
• Shout-Out:
  • With his thigh-high boots, one-piece suit, and husky yet effeminate voice, the leader of the eponymous order in "Order of the Black Cats" gives off strong vibes of Dr. Frank N. Furter.
  • Phoney Phelix
    • The Felix impostor is named Oscar, possibly a nod to Oscar and Felix from Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.
    • At one point Oscar sings a small verse of the 1950s Felix theme song.
    • In Oscar's flashback, one of the studios he is booted out of is called "Scumco". Also, in order to learn how to be a cartoon character, fake Felix attended an academy named Fleischer, an ad for which features a character plummeting off a cliff, Wile E. Coyote-style.
  • In the two-part episode "The Fuzzy Bunny Show", Felix was mistaken for Garfield once per part.
  • The episode "Nightmare on Oak Street'' features a villain who goes after victims in their dreams and Roscoe drinking tons of coffee to avoid him.
  • "The Maltese Milkshake'' has certain similarities with "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", including a bit where Felix realizes he has a dream sequence coming up and searches for a way to get knocked out.
  • The episode "Background Details", in which Felix and Roscoe search for a new background, is very reminiscent of "Duck Amuck".
  • The smiling moon used in the series strongly resembles the one in Krazy Kat.
  • "Star Trash" features a parody of the crew of the Starship Enterprise and at one point has Felix and Poindexter encounter a stand-in for Princess Leia, who is informed by Poindexter that she's in the wrong parody. When Felix is digging through his mail at the start of the episode, a familiar looking Bill is tossed aside. Poindexter also has a game that looks like a mix of Pac-Man and Space Invaders playing on his giant computer.
  • "Shell Shock" has Felix reading a magazine with the quote "Vaudeville isnt dead, it just smells funny.", a riff on a similar phrase (about jazz) by Frank Zappa.
• Sickeningly Sweet: The Fuzzy Bunny Show is viewed as this, as it's a show so utterly infantile, it makes Barney look downright masculine.
• Sidekick: Roscoe is Felix's best friend who accompanies Felix on many of his adventures. In one episode, even calls Felix his sidekick.
• Simpleton Voice: Roscoe, the Bermuda Triangle, and Oscar all have low, dopey voices to emphasize their low intelligence.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Whatever Roscoe said to insult the moon in "Black Magic Bag" is bleeped out.
• Souvenir Land: Played with. The carnival Felix goes to in "Step Right Up" is a pretty simple standard carnival, but it does contain a parody of the "Small World" ride.
• Spiritual Antithesis: The animators intended the show to be the polar opposite of Joe Oriolo's Felix the Cat cartoons due to their hatred of that series and love of the original Otto Messmer Felix cartoons. Don Oriolo, Joe's son, forced elements from that show like the Magic Bag into the first season, and put a stop to this altogether with the second seasons retool.
• Stealth Parody: "Phoney Phelix" is a none too subtle one of the shows retool in Season 2, where Felix has his show hijacked by an imbecilic imposter who imitates some of the traits of Oriolo Felix, such as saying his "Righty-O!" catchphrase, singing the TV show theme song and using a (shoddy knockoff) of the magic bag of tricks. As mentioned below, much of the staff hated the Joe Oriolo Felix and were not happy about the retool to make the show more in line with that take on the character.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Played for Laughs in "Guardian Idiot." Felix is playing ukulele for a small crowd on the street. When Felix finishes playing, he lifts the top of his head off to tip it like a hat. This is normal for Felix, because as a cartoon character, he frequently detaches parts of his body to use as various tools. But seeing the exposed inside of Felix's head, the crowd immediately screams and runs away (though nothing visceral is shown. The inside of Felix's head is just hollow.)
• Surreal Humor: Quite a lot of episodes are basically about Felix going through ridiculous and nonsensical events.
• Take That!: "Attack of the Robot Rat" is one to the series itself—it's a parody of the Joe Oriolo TV Felix cartoons, especially the crude parody of it on TV early in the film. Reportedly, most of the staff who worked on Twisted Tales openly despised the TV Felix cartoons and only begrudgingly added elements of it at the insistence of Don Oriolo, and wrote the episode in retaliation for the season 2 retool putting more emphasis on the style of the Joe Oriolo Felix. And as mentioned above, "Phoney Felix" is a Stealth Parody that sums up the staff's thoughts on the retool.
  • The executive who pitched the idea for eponymous show of "The Fuzzy Bunny Show" is named Donald, an obvious jab at Don Oriolo, then-owner of Felix the Cat, and his retool of the second season. They weren't even trying to be subtle about their dislike about it.
  • In the Star Trash episode:
  Poindexter: (to Mr. Gleep, the Spock expy) Uh, yeah, hi. Are you from a planet where they have no emotions?
  Mr. Gleep: No, I'm just a bad actor.
  • "Phony Phelix" also makes a jab at modern day animation industry.
  Company executive: (to Oscar after kicking him out of the studio) You don't get a cartoon show these days, unless you have a hit movie or a successful toyline!
  • In "Wizards and Lizards", Felix encounters a TV executive who claimed that the previous scene was violent and kids wouldn't get the joke. As she said, "We want the show to be edgy, we just need to take the fun out of it." At the end of the episode, she berates Felix for putting Poindexter in the video game and getting revenge.
  • In "The Punderground", the king of the island Mirthless claims that puns are the lowest form of humor ever. The list he uses to prove his claim shows the names Gallagher and Pauly Shore just above "puns".
• Toon Physics: The show frequently has characters take advantage of how things work in cartoons, one example being when Peking Duck hid Felix's magic bag of tricks inside One-Ton's dream cloud in "The Big Hunt".
• Un-person: Meta-example. The ending credits give both Otto Messmer (the series creator) and Joe Oriolo (who revived the character in the late 50's and kept the series alive from then on) credit as the creator of Felix the Cat, while Pat Sullivan, who owned the studio that made the original cartoons, but had virtually nothing to do with creating the character or drawing the cartoons, and falsely took credit for creating Felix in his lifetime, isn't mentioned at all.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Weirdness is so common in this world that no one bats an eye.
• Villain of the Week: This series had a fairly large gallery of oneshot villains and monsters for Felix to fight, such as Peking Duck, The Sludge King, The Bermuda Triangle, Jeepers Creepers, The Elf and many others. This is especially distinct in the context of the Felix the Cat series, which only had a handful of recurring villains and very few oneshot villains prior to this revival.
• Villain Song:
  • The Butcher gets one in "Guardian Idiot" about how he loves turning hapless animals into meat to serve his customers. 40 seconds in, if you dare...
  • The titular antagonist of "Bet A Billion Bill" gets a catchy number about his addiction to gambling and how he never loses.
  • Jeepers Creepers gets "I've Got a Lovely Nightmare for You" in "Nightmare on Oak Street," about how he loves to scare and haunt his victims at night.
• Visual Pun:
  • In "Black Magic Bag", we see the designer of the knockoff bags literally laughing all the way to the bank.
  • The asylum truck in "Felix's Big Splash" has an image of an acorn and a house, or "nuthouse".
  • Felix is seen standing on a soap box in the episode "TV or Not TV" during his spiel on why television is bad.
• Waxing Lyrical: In "The Maltese Milkshake" Felix answers the phone by (unenthusiastically) saying, "Felix the cat, the wonderful wonderful cat..." Five minutes later, a dame struts into his office and the Private Eye Monologue states "My heart went pit-a-pat!"
• We Will Meet Again: "Super Felix" ends with the Elf vowing to get even with Felix.
• Wealthy Yacht Owner: In "Viva Lost Wages", Bet-a-Billion Bill says he had two yachts before losing his fortune. When he earns and loses a new fortune, a yacht is seen among the repossessed items.
• Word, Schmord!: A hotel called the "Hotel Shmotel".
• Worst News Judgement Ever: In "News Blues", Felix reads a paper with the front page headline "MAN FINDS LOST SHOE!"
• Yellow Peril: Peking Duck, a minor villain in the series, is basically a G-rated variant of this. He's named after a Beijing duck recipe and dresses rather exotically, and he has two sumo wrestlers as henchmen. Not to mention his feathers are literally colored yellow. Downplayed in that he has a British accent.
• You Do Not Want To Know: In "Step Right Up", when Felix sees a seemingly normal-looking woman at a carnival sideshow.
  Nearby Boy: Hey, what's the gag, lady?
  Woman: [In a deep, manly voice] Believe me, kid, you don't wanna know.

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