Great Gifts for Cat Lovers

Duchess was the name of the female lead in the animated Walt Disney feature "The Aristocats." She was an elegant pedigreed mother cat. The male cat lead was O'Malley the Alley Cat. And this couple were amongst the most loved of cartoon cats ever drawn.

The film took four years to make, had a budget of over $4 million and was the first feature-length animated cartoon completed without Walt Disney.

Garfield is one of my favorite cats---the famous fat, lazy and lovable cat created in 1978 by Jim Davis. Garfield's love of lasagna is legendary.

The Garfield comic strip debuted in just 41 newspapers. Now the strip appears in over 2570 newspapers and is read daily by 263,000,000 people around the world. He was so popular a cat that his comic strip spawned the popular animated TV show, "Garfield & Friends," which appeared on CBS-TV from 1988 to 1995. In 2004, Garfield was immortalized in a feature film, Garfield: The Movie and a few years later the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties.

Among some of Garfield's words of wisdom:
I'll rise but I won't shine and The meek shall inherit Squat!

Other cartoon felines started out in cartoon strips but not Felix the Cat. He began his career as a movie cartoon star in the first "talkie" cartoon, a year before Mickey Mouse started talking. Shortly thereafter he was put in print by King Features and was syndicated in over 250 newspapers, reaching almost every corner of the world.

Felix was so famous that Charles Lindbergh chose him as his lucky mascot during his historic transatlantic flight. The very first image to be broadcast on airwaves was, you guessed it, Felix. When the engineers at RCA Research Labs were working on the incredible creation, the TV, they used a Felix doll as their test model in the very first transmission on NBC.

I can even remember my mom having a Felix the Cat kitchen clock.

Check back often and I'll give the link for the bi-weekly CAT'S MEOW Top 10 List. That's where you can place your vote for the entries that will compete for the CAT'S MEOW Top 10 for 2010.