Felix turns babysitter with predictable results

Felix Minds the Kid (1922)
Director: Otto Messinger
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

The world's most irresponsible father asks Felix the Cat to watch his baby.

"Felix Minds the Kid" is a fun bit of nonsense from beginning to end. It gets a little too nonsensical at one point for me, but not disastrously so. It's also one of those shorts where if I say too much about it, I will ruin the fun of watching it. I'll just make the comment that anyone who asks a stray cat (even one that can talk and use tools) may be the worst parent ever. It's both funny and troubling. 

One nice thing about this cartoon is that while Felix generally tends to be a bit of a trickster and a troublemaker and almost 100 percent self-centered, here he does seem to be genuinely concerned about the baby's well-being. Sure--he's going to get rewarded or punished depending on how successful his babysitting efforts are, but he goes beyond the call of duty more than once here. 

Without spoiling the cartoon, I think I can mention that one of my favorite bits in the cartoon is how all human babies look alike to Felix; sort of like how a litter of black kittens look alike to humans. My least favorite parts involve gags that make me think no one who worked on this production know why some inflated balloons float in the air.

With that said, I highly recommend you bring a little joy into your life by checking out Felix's turn at baby sitting. I am embedding a version of it that can be found on YouTube, below. However, the image is so degraded, washed out and blurry that you'll barely be able to follow what's going. This is the case for all the YouTube uploads I looked at... because they all seem to be taken from the same source.

A much better source for watching "Felix Minds the Kid" would be "Felix the Cat: Early Cartoon Classics" from Alpha Video. The version on this disc is in much better shape than the one you might find on YouTube, and it's one of ten Felix episodes contained on it. So far, each one that I've watched on the disc has been in better shape than any of the versions I could find on line, since they were digitized from the personal collection of film preservationist John Carpenter. I think this collection is more than a bargain at the asking price