Beans (cartoon character)

Beans the Cat is an animated cartoon character from the mid-1930s Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series of cartoons.

When the cartoon animators/directors Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising left Leon Schlesinger's studios in 1933 and took their main creation with them (Bosko), Schlesinger had to rebuild his animation studio for Warner Bros. without even a marketable character to draw audiences.

In Bosko's absence, Buddy was introduced, who was a small human boy with very similar characteristics to Bosko, except he was less entertaining. In 1935, in an attempt to jumpstart the studio with some new characters, the Tex Avery Merrie Melodies cartoon I Haven't Got a Hat debuted. Its cast consisted of cute animal characters with funny names (Ham and Ex, Porky & Beans, Oliver Owl and Little Kitty) in the hopes that some would become bankable stars.

Beans' character design is one of the last of a series of thinly veiled copies of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse character produced during the 1930s in reaction to Mickey's enormous popularity. (Ironically, the character design of Mickey himself is a thinly veiled copy of Felix the Cat, an enormously popular cartoon star of the 1920s.)

After the success of I Haven't Got a Hat, Warner began to push Beans the Cat as their next cartoon star. In 1935, Buddy was retired and Beans starred in his first Looney Tunes cartoon entitled A Cartoonist's Nightmare. Several more cartoons followed with Beans in the lead role. However it soon became clear that the character that audiences were talking about was Beans' stuttering pig sidekick, Porky Pig.

In April of 1936, Beans starred in his last cartoon short entitled Westward Whoa along with the rest of the ensemble cast introduced in I Haven't Got A Hat. This cartoon was also the last to feature any of the other characters. After Westward Whoa, all Looney Tunes cartoons for the rest of the decade starred Porky Pig, who was occasionally paired with Gabby Goat and later Daffy Duck).