Dr. Jerkyl's Hide
Dr. Jerkyl's Hide
| 07 May 1954 (USA)
Dr. Jerkyl's Hide Trailers

Two cockney canines chase Sylvester Cat into the lab of Dr. Jerkyl, where the cat drinks Hyde formula...

Reviews
Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System
Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess
Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
Edgar Allan Pooh . . . for we Americans of (The Then) Far Future, their rightly famed Animated Shorts Seers division (aka, The Looney Tuners) once again outdo themselves (as well as any rhyming pronouncements that over-rated Bozo from Yesteryear, Nostradamus, ever attempted) with this brief cartoon from 1954, DR. JERKYL'S HIDE. Many viewers have wondered WHY this particular Sylvester Cat outing features a couple of mutts speaking with foreign accents. There are several explanations for this, most of which only have made sense to the casual animation fan during the past few historic months. As DR. JERKYL'S HIDE screens, Sylvester is alternately his normal self and a scary monster. The only way the Looney Tuners could have made it more clear to whom in Today's news they are clairvoyantly referring is to show Sylvester typing out irrational late-night Tweets with his diminutive digits. Certainly Warner is warning the USA of a self-destructive so-called political party which increasingly insists upon installing demented geriatric geezers suffering from the middle or late stages of Alzheimer's Disease atop the Button of America's nuclear arsenal. No wonder the Looney Tune Folks are depicting the other characters in this DR. JERKYL'S HIDE tale as foreigners. During recent days the International Community has been increasingly scared to death by the Real Life Symptoms of a Coming Apocalyptic Meltdown, as first forecast by this Sylvester episode.
utgard14 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.
Lee Eisenberg While Sylvester usually is lovable sap getting his comeuppances for chasing Tweety or Speedy, he occasionally got used in different kinds of roles, namely when he co-starred with dogs Spike and Chester (Spike is named Alfie in "Dr. Jerkyl's Hide"). In these cartoons, the big, menacing Spike would go try to make mincemeat out of Sylvester, but something would always happen to make Spike believe that Sylvester was some sort of monster...at which point Sylvester would show up and puny Chester would clobber him.So it goes here, in which Sylvester runs into Dr. Jerkyl's laboratory, drinks a certain potion, and...well, you can probably guess what happens. It's a quite enjoyable cartoon. Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg were always a cool voice combo.
dispet this is among my all time favourite looney tunes. the characters of the two dogs in it are hilarious and sylvester is great in a more catty role than usual. when he transforms into the giant monster cat and beats the you know what out of the bulldog, hahaha, it is so funny and the look on the little dogs face everytime it happens, this is what cartoon comedy is all about.it is to bad we will never see cartoons like this again, instead we have to put up with animaniacs and all this speilberg produced wannabe bullsh*t. Well at least we can always return to the classics like these. thank god for mel blanc and croonies