The success of Ralph Bakshi’s adult animation, Fritz the Cat (1972), particularly among a young adult demographic that was usually resistant to animation, fairly demanded a sequel. Bakshi, Fritz’s creator, comic book artist Robert Crumb, and almost everyone else sensibly declined to get involved – Bakshi was busy working on his next film, Heavy Traffic (1973) and Crumb seems to have just not been interested (he’s said to have largely disowned the film and certainly didn’t take a credit)- leaving just producer Steve Krantz and Fritz’s voice actor Skip Hinnant to pick up where they left off. In retrospect, it was a very wise move as the sequel is a huge disappointment, a scrappy anthology that no longer had even have the shock value of the first film, which remains historically important, even if it really wasn’t all that great.

Presumably set some time after the first film (though in truth there’s virtually no connection between the two other than the main character and one supporting player), Fritz is now married to a perpetually angry and disappointed female cat (voiced by Reva Rose), on benefits and father to a baby named Ralphie who masturbates constantly. During one of his wife’s frequent dressing downs, he smokes marihuana and drifts off into his own little world where he tries to work out what his life might have been like if he’d made different choices. What follows is a kaleidoscopic romp through these alternative timelines that barely form anything like an actual narrative. Along the way, he has weird drug trips (it all feels even more psychedelic than the original), gets very friendly with Chita (Louisa Moritz), a Puerto Rican woman, meets a street dweller who claims to be God, finds himself working as an orderly to Adolf Hitler, offering the Fuehrer therapeutic advice and narrowly avoids being raped buy him.

Elsewhere, he falls foul of the liquor store owner shoe wife he slept with, becomes a stud in a very psychedelic 1930s, offers pawn shop owner Morris the crow a used toilet seat if he’ll cash his benefits cheque for him, winds up as the first cat on mars after joining NASA, meets the ghost of his crow friend Duke who was killed in the first film, joining him in a near-future New Jersey that has seceded from the United States and become “New Africa” (in a very distant echo of the British comedy classic The Mouse That Roared (1959), directed by Jack Arnold, the New Africans plan to start a war with the States that they intend to lose and reap the rewards of war reparations), and meets an Indian guru and the Devil in the sewers of New York. He also dies. A lot…

Stripped of that power to shock (despite some puerile efforts from new director Robert Taylor and his co-writers Fred Halliday and Eric Monte) and deprived of the honour of at least being a pioneer, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat is a very poor relative indeed. Its storyline is even less coherent than that of its predecessor and it’s notably less socially and politically committed this time too. The original film often felt like it was misguided and misfiring, but its heart was in the right place and at least it had a (sort of) point. This just feels like a string of juvenile gross-out and sex jokes and without the all-important satirical edge, some of the gags about racism, sexism and homophobia feel more like snickering endorsements than well considered takedowns.

One of the better things about it is a notable score written by Tom Scott and performed by his jazz rock fusion band L.A. Express. It’s a fairly boisterous and mostly uplifting score that goes someway to alleviating the strangely bleak tone that otherwise ruins through the film – surprisingly, it really isn’t that funny at all. A soundtrack of the score was planned but eventually it was shelved when the film flopped at the box office, leaving only a single release of the song Jump Back to make it into the wild. It didn’t do well and nor did the film, putting paid to any further outings for cinema’s most subversive feline. It was nominated for the Palm d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and like most of the films even remotely touched by the presence of Ralph Bakshi (even though he had nothing whatsoever to do with this one) it’s picked up a cult following. But it really isn’t a very good film at all – Bakshi himself claimed never to have even bothered seeing it – that really doesn’t stand up to even the less than stellar original film.

Bakshi and Krantz parted ways after falling out during the production of Heavy Traffic during with the director accused his producer of withholding profits from Fritz the Cat. Bakshi went on to direct a string of animated features, among them Coonskin (1974), Wizards (1974) and The Lord of the Rings (1978), based on the first half of Tolkien’s trilogy; Krantz went on to produce Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977) and Brice Mack’s Jennifer (1978) but mainly worked in television; and Taylor directed a feature version of Heidi’s Song (1982) but spent most of his subsequent career also working on the small screen. And as for Fritz? The Complete Fritz the Cat, collecting all of his comic strip adventures and some additional previously unseen sketches and designs from Crumb but he never troubled the big screen again.