Dial 'P' for Pink

Pink Panther Odyssey Part IV

Back on form after the strangely meandering and confusingly titled "stamp" mall run, this brilliantly deft burglar v a random safe-dwelling panther is gloriously explosive fun with a fantastically witty ending. A very consistent one and a serious lark.

I seem to be alone in thinking that the Pink Panther cartoons are fairly awful. This one does little to convince me otherwise, with predictable gags and horrible animation. In Dial P for Pink, a burglar tries to break open a safe, but doesn't realise that it is home to The Pink Panther, who isn't happy about being disturbed.

Why is The Pink Panther living inside a safe, especially one in which the top and sides open like doors, rendering it totally useless? Who knows, but this idea leads to lots of weak jokes in which the panther is able to nip in and out of the safe to cause all sorts of problems for the burglar. The gag in which the burglar mistakes a radio for the safe is lifted straight out of one of the Pink Panther movies.

This one is number 4 in the list of The Pink Panther's cartoons. This is definitely one of my favorites. So simple, yet so enjoyable. This one can make anyone give some good laughters.

This is original, creative, hilarious and has lots of imagination too. In this story, our friend feline deals with a thief who wants to crack a safe. Unfortunately for the thief, whenever he tries to do anything to the safe, his attempts always turn against him, thanks to Pinky (who's hidden inside the safe). Pinky makes the thief's life miserable, causing him to fall off the window, returning explosives to the thief (which always explode on the thief)...

There are many good gags in this. Even the ending is absolutely hilarious.

What makes the cartoon even funnier is that, most of the time, the thief doesn't even know that the Pink Panther is inside the safe and, as such, doesn't understand what's happening to him.

These first Pink Panther cartoons all had the same thing: the panther driving someone nuts! In this case, it's a second-story burglar. Just inside the window is a safe and the little man is there to crack it. Unfortunately, the Pink Panther is inside. Why? We have no clue, but the fact is that he's there and he drives the totally befuddled thief insane by constantly changing locks, opening the top door and pushing him back out the window, etc.

For all but the last 50 seconds of the cartoon, the burglar doesn't know the Panther is inside the safe. When he discovers, some really strange scenes occur. It's amazing how many gags they produce in less than a minute!

One of the strongest of the Pink Panther shorts, this succeeds by a series of gags on the same theme: a safe cracker attempting to break into a safe inside of which is the Pink Panther -- the panther itself, of course.

It also is strengthened by not having the two problems of many of the Depatie-Freleng cartoons. It does not have actively ugly backgrounding -- the backgrounding, instead, is nondescript -- and it does not have a laugh track, so you can enjoy it on your own terms.

What it does have is the Pink Panther, a character with little personality, That is a weakness of all of the series. A comedian without a personality may do funny things and make you laugh, but he is also replaceable by any other comedian. It is odd that the old pros who did these cartoons seem to have forgotten that, but there you have it.