THE CATTANOOGA CATS - Know Where It's At

The Cattanooga Cats were a Hanna-Barbera creation consisting of Scoots, Country, Groove & Kitty Jo. Four Southern feline hipsters on the road peddling their groovy gum tunes and getting into wacky adventures wherever they roamed. The songs they played were written and performed by 17 year old Michael Lloyd, a member of the mighty West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and produced by the famous Mike Curb, the man who kicked all those "dangerous" psychedelic bands such as the Velvet Underground off the MGM label when he took it over in his mid 20's in favour of "family" oriented groups such as the Osmonds and the Cowsills (Curb also formed the Mike Curb Congregation, a group akin to the Ray Conniff Singers).

The Cattanooga's ran for a relatively short time on TV, but managed to unleash a slab of subliminal songwriting subversity onto the kids via tunes such as "My Birthday Suit" and this snappy little number, "Mother May I".
The Cat's opening theme song was accompanied by animation master Iwao Takamoto's strobing op art images.

The show also introduced three regular cartoon segments: It's The Wolf (featuring the voice of Paul Lynde as Mildew Wolf), Autocat & Motormouse (see more pics at The Motormouse Page in Portuguese), and Around The World In 79 Days. This was also one of the last HB shows to feature "talking animals" (in the Huck/Yogi tradition) before HB launched into creating dozens of Scooby Doo-inspired Mystery cartoons like The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan Clan, Goober And The Ghost Chasers, and many others. Motormouse recieved his own show for one season in September 1970 on ABC Saturday Mornings.