When I went back to digging through the list of Academy Awards winners for Animated Shorts, I got tempted to write about Munro (1960), the first short made outside of the United States to be granted such award. But looking further through the list I saw the name of one of everyone’s most beloved characters to have it’s very own first short, after making it’s debut appearance in the homonym live action feature film, The Pink Panther (1963), and I felt like I had to write about it.
The charming pink fella was created by Blake Edwards, Friz Freleng and Hawley Pratt to be an animated representation of the elusive pink diamond that the movie is all about. It was supposed to only appear during the opening and credit rolls of the United Artists’ film, but the success of the character was so great that the studio signed with DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Friz studio, for the production of a animated series for the Panther.
The Pink Phink (1964), directed by Freleng, was the first short of the series and starts with the Panther wandering inside a house where a man is painting the walls with blue paint. The cat actually tastes the paint and, after obviously disliking it, it swaps the bucket with another one with pink paint. After adding a few strokes of pink to the wall, the painter goes after the Pink Panther, who starts to deceive and battle him for which color the house should be, pink or blue. They paint over each other’s work in a sequence of funny scenes, all accompanied by the famous theme composed by Henry Mancini.
The maddened painter eventually loses it and gets a shotgun to shoot the Panther, but you can see how the story turns out for yourself, as The Pink Phink short is available to be watched for free in the Official Pink Panther channel in YouTube.
References:
“The Pink Phink”. Apr 14, 2014. Official Pink Panther.
“The Pink Panther”. Retro Planet Blog. Aug 28, 2008.
Rovin, Jeff (1991). The illustrated encyclopedia of cartoon animals.
