Eek! The Cat
The purple Fox Kids cat whose motto was "it never hurts to help," and whose every good deed ended with him screaming "Oh gosh, it hurts!" Halfway through the run it picked up a second act about dinosaur mercenaries, and the whole thing became Eek! Stravaganza.
Eek! The Cat was created by filmmaker Savage Steve Holland and animator Bill Kopp, who also voiced Eek, and it ran on the Fox Kids Saturday-morning block from fall 1992 to summer 1997. It was produced by Fox Kids and Holland's Savage Studios with the animation house Nelvana. Holland has said the idea grew out of losing three cats in a row, one of them to antifreeze, and that he put $30,000 of his own money into a five-minute colour section of the pilot to sell it.
Eek lived in the city of McTropolis with a human family he could not talk to and an unshakable belief that helping never hurts. It always did. Most episodes were built around the pain his kindness earned him, whether from mail-sorting machinery or from Sharky the Sharkdog, the shark-shaped guard dog of his enormous Southern-belle girlfriend Annabelle, who arrived with his own theme music. The supporting cast included Elmo the Elk (voiced by Holland), the paranoid cat Mittens (Dan Castellaneta, then John Kassir), and the Squishy Bearz, a merciless Care Bears parody. The writers spoofed Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange for an audience that had seen neither, and packed in celebrity cameos. A recurring executive named Mr. Iwanter was a caricature of the real Fox Kids executive Sid Iwanter.
The first season was thirteen twenty-minute episodes. For the second, in 1993, the show was split into two nine-minute segments, the second being The Terrible Thunderlizards, Holland and Kopp's tale of three dinosaur mercenaries hired to eliminate two cavemen named Bill and Scooter. Production delays pushed its debut to November 20, 1993, and the series was retitled Eek! and the Terrible Thunderlizards, then Eek! Stravaganza. Jason Priestley voiced the dinosaur Bo Diddly Squat before Corey Feldman took over. A third segment, Klutter!, about a pet built from a pile of junk, ran for eight instalments from fall 1995 to February 1996.
Ownership passed to Disney in 2001 along with the rest of the Fox Kids parent company, and the show has never had a proper American DVD release. The only major English-language set came from a Czech distributor in 2010.
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