Telefeatures and Evergreen Media Group have announced plans to move forward on a film adaptation of the animated super hero parody serial.
Bob Kane, the credited creator of Batman back in 1939, penned Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse in 1960, as a parody of what had become of his famous characters over the previous 20 years.
The show was picked up by Telefeatures, and ran syndicated from 1960 to 1962.
Courageous and Minute live in Empire City, and though they don’t have secret identities – the show was too short for that kind of complexity – they do boast many of the other trappings that we find in the story of Batman and Robin from the 60’s. This includes vehicles named after the hero and a prevalence of toys and gadgets for to fight crime with, although his primary weapon is a gun which shoots a variety of trick bullets.
Their episodic enemy was Flat Face, a frog who ran the criminal underworld of Empire City, but other villains were featured in the show, like Rodney Rodent, Iron Shark, and Professor Von Noodle Strudel. When these nefarious foes would threaten the city, the police chief, a dog of course, calls the heroes on the Cat-signal.
The 130 episodes of the show, at only 5 minutes apiece only add up to about ten hours of material, but no single plot-line is anywhere near long enough to make a feature-length film out of, so there is no telling which villains or plot might be chosen for the film, nor how all the extra time will be filled.
“For years we resisted overtures for the property,” Telefeatures director Debbie Litt said in a press release. “However, because of … Evergreen’s longstanding track record of finding great new takes to reboot classic properties we had a significant comfort level in entrusting them with Courageous Cat.”
If you want to check out some episodes, seaching YouTube brings some up, but due to copyright restrictions, we can’t post any here.
