Muzzle Tough

Muzzle Tough is a Warner Brothers "Merrie Melodies" animated cartoon featuring Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, Granny and Hector the Bulldog. First shown in 1954, it was written by Warren Foster and directed by Isadore “Friz” Freleng, with voice characterizations by Mel Blanc.

The title puns on a Yiddish expression, "mazel tov", which roughly translates to "good luck".

Synopsis

The story begins with Granny and two moving men in their truck (which reads “Checker Movers, It’s Your Move”) searching for her new house, which they soon find. The movers walk Granny’s things past Sylvester as he is napping on top of the wall surrounding the house. Sylvester suddenly wakes up when the movers parade Tweety in his cage past him, and Tweety says, “I tawt I taw a puddytat!” Immediately, Sylvester starts to pursue Tweety atop the wall, but then crashes into a lamp post and falls off the wall. Sylvester climbs back up as Tweety is carried into the house, while another mover sets Hector’s doghouse down on the ground. Sylvester steps down upon the roof of the doghouse as he comes down from the wall, and when Hector sees him, he likewise says, “I tawt I taw a puddytat!” Hector then bites Sylvester’s tail and chases him back out to the street.

Plotting to get past Hector and finagle his way into the house, Sylvester disguises himself as a lamp, putting a shade on his head. After a mover carries him in and sets him on the table next to Tweety’s cage, Tweety plugs Sylvester’s tail into the outlet, giving Sylvester a massive electric jolt. Hector bites Sylvester and also gets zapped, then chases him out of the house and back to the street again.

Sylvester then tries posing as one of the movers...and gets Granny’s piano loaded into his arms! Tweety guides Sylvester all the way up the stairs to the top floor and through a doorway, which sends Sylvester plummeting with the piano to the street below, prompting Tweety to remark, “Ooooh, dat wast step was a wuwu!”

Making another attempt, Sylvester hides under a bear rug to sneak up on Tweety and climbs up to his cage. Granny, frightened at the sight, thinks the bear had been “playing ’possum for twenty years” and fires several pistol shots at Sylvester before Hector chases him out again.

Finally, Sylvester goes to the costume shop and dresses up as a voluptuous female dog to lure Hector away from the front steps. As the instantly lovestruck Hector approaches, Sylvester is preparing to knock him out with a mallet, but before he does, a dog catcher captures Sylvester in his net and locks him in his truck. Outraged, Sylvester furiously pounds on the window, demanding the dog catcher to let him out. He then removes the head from his costume yelling, “I’m not a dog, I’m a cat! K-A-T!”—a fatal error, as all the dogs in the truck notice immediately and begin to attack him as the truck disappears down the street. Tweety then says, “Dere won’t be no more puddytats awound to chase me now!”, before he sees two cats in the room with lamp shades on their heads, to which he says, “Of tourse, I tould be wong!”

Censorship

• The following scenes were cut when this cartoon was shown on ABC's The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show [1]:
  • Granny shooting Sylvester (who is hiding underneath a bearskin rug).
  • Sylvester disguising himself as a lamp, and Tweety plugging the cat's tail into an electrical socket.
  • Hector the bulldog biting the electrically-charged Sylvester and getting shocked as well.

External references

Muzzle Tough at Internet Movie Database [2]