A reposting from former Ohio animation studio Character Builders's detailed Space Jam feature on their website from 1997. Link at https://web.archive.org/web/19970128200448/http://www.cbuilders.com/cat.htm.
Of all the Warner Brothers characters, Sylvester has always held a special place in my heart. His creator, the great Friz Freleng, gave him a wonderful unity of design and personality. Unlike his partner/adversary Tweety, who looks guileless and helpless but is actually quite wily and capable of defending himself with extreme prejudice, Sylvester's clownish exterior fails to mask his equally clownish interior. With Sylvester, what you see is literally what you get. Each thought that crosses his mind and each emotion that enters his heart is openly displayed in his face and form. He is a wholly externalized pussycat who should avoid poker games at all costs. Never the brightest of characters, Sylvester is at least a couple of rungs up from the bottom of the intelligence ladder (said bottom rung being occupied by Elmer Fudd).
Perhaps Sylvester's most endearing quality is that his sense of self is defined by the fact that he is a cat and that his highest ambition is to be a successful cat. To be a successful cat, one must succeed at the following activities; being lazy, scavenging through trash cans, catching and eating mice, catching and eating tweety birds, yowling on back alley fences in the dead of night and last, but not least, passing on the techniques of successful cathood to one's offspring. Needless to say, Sylvester's sense of self takes just as many lumps as his thick head does. And yet in spite of physical pain and wounded pride he always comes back for more. In spite of Granny and her wicked aim with a broom he comes back for more. In spite of falling pianos, crazed bulldogs and stray high voltage wires he comes back for more. Sylvester can be undone but he can never be truly defeated. He will always make one more attempt to eat the tweety bird or one more try to catch the giant mouse, because after all, he is a pussycat.
Even in the early drafts of the Space Jam screenplay (of which there were more than a few) there was a potentially juicy character moment for Sylvester in a sequence (officially logged as Scene 34; "Bugs Challenges Aliens") that we commonly referred to as "The War Room." The setup is as follows; Bugs Bunny has managed to con the five tiny aliens who have captured him into agreeing to a competition, the outcome of which will determine the fate of all of the Looney Tunes characters. Bugs then convenes a council of war (which was, at one point in storyboarding, set in the "Dr. Strangelove" War Room, hence the common title) with Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd and Sylvester. With a brain trust like that it's obvious that Bugs will have to exercise some serious leadership skills to coax them all along to the same conclusion. Porky proposes a lame idea. Elmer tops Porky's lame idea with a genuinely stupid idea, at which point Sylvester, exasperated with the cluelessness of the others, pitches his idea; a complete nonsequitur involving getting a ladder, waiting until the old lady is out of the room and then grabbing the little bird.
Several different versions of the War Room sequence were prepared during the storyboarding process. One intriguing version had Sylvester acting out his whole speech on camera in one continuous shot. The shot would have been about 20 feet (13 seconds) long. It's a good challenge to try to hold an audience for that long in a single shot of one character talking with no props to use or other characters on camera to interact with. This version was ultimately discarded, but from time to time I find myself wondering how I would have done with it.
In the final version of the storyboard, Sylvester's speech is distributed over five shots. Sylvester enters, back to the camera, at the tail of a wide shot of Porky, Bugs, Daffy and Elmer standing around a table. Just after he starts his rant we cut to a medium closeup of Sylvester. As Sylvester begins to detail his "plan," -we cut in to his fantasy for two shots, in which he finally catches Tweety. Sylvester works himself into a frenzy, panting wildly as he prepares to devour his prey. We dissolve out of the fantasy to reveal Sylvester grasping, not Tweety, but his own thumb. Bugs enters the frame and tries to coax Sylvester back to reality.
With the storyboard approved and the voice tracks recorded, I could begin to shape Sylvester's performance in animation. Veteran voice artist Bill Farmer (the voice of Disney's Goofy) performs several roles in "Space Jam," including Sylvester and Yosemite Sam. His performance of Sylvester's War Room rant gave me everything I could possibly want to work with. I particularly liked how he built Sylvester's excitement, culminating in a particularly demented kind of heavy breathing. After repeated listenings to the voice track, I could begin to draw.
I usually start a scene by trying to nail down a handful of strong character poses for what I feel are the scene's key moments. Typically, I'll spend a couple of days doing a lot of drawings that end up in the trash before I find the four or five poses that have potential. These poses go through a number of drafts before I'm ready to send them on to supervisor Jim Kammerud (and anyone else at Character Builders that cares to comment on them). The objective is to capture the essence of the character's performance in a few clear drawings that can serve as the foundation for the many drawings that will follow. We ask ourselves whether or not the drawings capture what the character is thinking and feeling at that moment in time. Just as important in the world of Looney Tunes is whether or not the drawings bring out the humor inherent in the character. With the Looney Tunes characters there is the potential for some level of comedy in every shot.
The main thing I wanted to get out of the sequence was a fresh, funny way to showcase Sylvester's very familiar persona. The idea of Sylvester addressing a group of characters and trying to assume a leadership role echoes Bob Clampett's "Kitty Kornered" (1946). While I avoided directly referencing existing animation, "Kitty Kornered" along with Friz Freleng's "Back Alley Oproar" -(1948) greatly influenced my work on Sylvester. In both cartoons, Sylvester strikes poses that suggest the theatricality of a Victorian ham actor or orator. I felt that at this moment in "Space Jam," just as he is in these earlier cartoons, Sylvester should be very much enjoying his own performance. He is absolutely thrilled and excited to be proposing a bold and decisive plan of action, in spite of the fact that it is the very same plan that he's been failing at for the past fifty years and has no application to the problem at hand. It's his plan, the plan of a true pussycat, and he's proud of it!
Sylvester's excitement turns to frenzy as, in his fantasy, he is about to finally succeed in eating Tweety. The heavy breathing on the voice track and the interaction between Sylvester and Bugs reminded me of an old Marx Brothers routine from "Animal Crackers" in which Harpo goes berserk and starts sucker-punching Margaret Dumont. Chico pulls Harpo off of the hapless victim and tries to snap him back to reality. Harpo sort of comes back to reality in a fast transition from frenzied heavy breathing to nodding his head at Chico and grinning like an idiot. I adapted this bit of business for Sylvester, although Bugs shows a bit more concern for his addled friend than Chico shows toward Harpo. Ever-perceptive, Bugs knows that fifty years of thwarted tweety-bird cravings can really take a toll on a self-respecting pussycat.
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