Countdown to Halloween: Cherche le Phantom (1968)

Cherche le Phantom (1968, DePatie-Freleng)
Dir.: Gerry Chiniquy
TC4P Rating: 5/9

During last year's Countdown to Halloween festivities, I published a review of my very favorite cartoon of The Inspector series, Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! (Click link to peruse at your leisure.) For the unfamiliar, the series of Inspector shorts were a spin-off from Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series of theatrical films, most of them featuring comic genius Peter Sellers as the bumbling French detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau. In the cartoon series, while the character is initially meant to invoke memories of Clouseau, he is never called Clouseau during its run, but merely "The Inspector". He also doesn't really caricature Sellers – the Inspector is in the cartoons has a far wispier mustache for instance – but there is enough of a resemblance to make the connection. However, the cartoon Inspector is equally as bumbling as the original, and like him, he also somehow manages to solve the crime in most cases but only because he is quick to take advantage and claim credit when it is in fact his clumsiness and lack of logic that accidentally carries him to the solution.

Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! featured the Inspector and his pint-sized, loyal sidekick, Sergeant Deux-Deux facing off against a Dr. Jekyll-type mad scientist, with the twist being that little Deux-Deux is the one who innocently drinks the doctor's formula. The comedy for the rest of the cartoon derives from the Inspector expecting Deux-Deux at one moment only to find the Hyde monster, who thrashes him, and then repeating attempts revolving around generally the same situation. Much of the appeal of the cartoon for me is the monster angle, of course – along with it accompanying my very first theatrical viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the early '80s – but the Inspector met up with the supernatural in other cartoons a couple of years later in the series.

In Transylvania Mania, both Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster attempt to capture the Inspector in order to put his brain inside yet another monstrous creation. We will get to that short at a later date – possibly next Halloween – but today we are concentrating on Cherche le Phantom, the 28th out of 34 cartoons in the series. When I mentioned the word "supernatural" before, it was only via the loosest of definitions, for while a supernaturally powered villain is suggest by both the title and the actions in Cherche le Phantom – there is an opera house and there seems to be something monstrous wreaking havoc in the place – the solution is so dully earthbound but also ridiculously strained enough to be almost unbelievable even in the context of a purely cartoonish universe.

Cherche le Phantom opens on the sight of a small police car bearing the redoubtable Inspector and Deaux-Deaux, as it rolls along the cobblestones of Paris. The Inspector (voiced by the late Pat Harrington, Jr.) begins his usual narrating of the tale we are about to see, a constant of the series.

"Sgt. Deaux-Deaux and I had just completed our night beat when the Commissioner contacted us." A light buzzes again and again on the dashboard of the police car, and the Inspector picks up his car phone to speak to his boss. The Commissioner demands that they head to his office right away, but the Inspector insists that his shift has ended and that he plans to go home. His boss, a rather explosive and consistently angered personality, begins to threaten the Inspector if he does not report immediately. Naturally, this also riles up the Inspector, and once off the radio, he takes it out on the one person who normally receives the brunt of his attacks: poor Sgt. Deux-Deux.

He yells, "Well, just don't sit there! Hurry up! Step on it!" A now saddened Deux-Deux, who does not like it when the Inspector yells at him for no reason, meekly says "Sí!" and steps on it, the "it" in question not being an accelerator pedal on the car's floor but rather the Inspector's own foot. The Inspector lambasts his assistant, and the pair then take off to police headquarters.

The Commissioner stands in front of his office window with his hands clasped behind his back as he spies the pair of bungling cops arrive. "Uh... here comes that stupid Inspector! He's more trouble than he's worth!" Outside, Deaux-Deaux  screeches the police car to a halt and the Inspector bounds through the entrance to the commissioner's office. However, when he slams the door open, it hits the Commissioner in the face and the man is sent flying out through the office window. Luckily, it is a first floor office. From the ground outside, the Commissioner hears the Inspector put the pieces together... very wrongly, of course. "That's strange, huh? The Commissioner gone... a broken window... hmmmm....this smacks of foul play!" The Commish runs through his office dear and pounds the Inspector over the head with his meaty fist. "How's that for a smack, you bumbling idiot?"

The Commissioner then gets down to business. He gives the Inspector his choice of two different assignments. "One is to find a gorilla that escaped from the zoo, and the other is to investigate a Phantom creature that has been haunting the Paris Opera House."

While we know, given the short running time of Inspector cartoons, that the gorilla will undoubtedly turn out to be the very same Phantom creature – somehow combining Edgar Allan Poe and Gaston Leroux in the same short film – we have to give the Inspector time to make his comic mistakes and then bumble eventually into the solution. The Inspector proclaims that the Phantom case would be the one most suited to "a crime fighter of my caliber and capability." The Commissioner, though, is not buying it. "Never mind the baloney! Just get going! On the double!" The Inspector hightails it, and the Commissioner says to himself, "Oooh, one of these days!" and pounds his fist on his desk.

Outside, the Inspector orders Deaux-Deaux, who almost always drives the car, to "the Opera House... and hurry!" This, naturally, sets up a running Pink Panther series gag where Clouseau will order his driver, assistant, or other people from outside of whatever vehicle being used and then they take off without allowing him to get inside the vehicle. Those types of gags were transferred wholesale to the cartoon version of Clouseau (though he is never referred to by that name, possibly for copyright issues). "Come back here, you fool!," yells the Inspector, and we hear Deaux-Deaux put the car in reverse, which is a bad thing as well for the Inspector, for he ends up getting backed over, as usual. Talking to the camera, the now rumpled Inspector says, "Sometimes I wonder how he ever got into the French police force."

We next see their police car sitting in a Paris alley, where a pair of doors are lit by a single lamp that lights up a sign reading "Le Opera Stage Door". (You know, just how it reads in France...) The Inspector orders his sergeant to wait with the car while he goes to investigate but tells Deaux-Deaux that if he is needed, the Inspector will blow his whistle. He then enters the opera house to find an empty room. The narration continues...

"As the performance had ended several hours before, I figured that the Phantom, thinking that he was alone, would be more vulnerable to capture, eh? Hmm..." The Inspector tiptoes through the room and into the backstage area, and then onto the stage itself. He walks to the middle of the stage and looks out into the darkened seating area of the opera house. He yells, "Is anybody in here?" and his voice is heard to echo back at him. Getting no answer back riles up the Inspector, who balls his hands into fists and orders, "Alright, you Phantom creature! If you don't surrender at once, I shall be forced to use stronger tactics!"

Suddenly, a purple curtain drops just behind him, and then flies back up as quick as it came down. The determined cop pulls his gun and turns around, yelling "Aha! So, you're up there, eh? Well, if you don't come down by the time I count to three, I'm going to drop you right in your tracks! Ha ha ha!" He makes ready to count, starting, "One... two..." but then a trap door opens on the stage, whisking the Inspector straight downward to crash in the dark below. He runs up the stairs and heads back to the center of the stage again. "So, trying to assassinate an officer, eh? Why, this will put out your light!" He points his gun upward, but then the lights really do go out in the opera house! All that we can see of him are the two eyeballs of the Inspector roughly mid-screen. "Alright, wise guy! Turn on the lights or else!"

A spotlight is turned right on the Inspector but he leaps out of the way without hesitation. "Oh no, you don't! You're not putting me on the spot!" The spotlight jumps over to the Inspector's new position, but he jumps back to his original place again, and the spotlight gives chase. The Inspector laughs in triumph, "Aha, I'm a bit too fast for you, huh?!" and then leaps again into the dark... and when the spotlight follows him, we see the empty trap door as the Inspector screams and crashes through the stage and into the dark below once more.

The Inspector runs up the stairs once more and zips back out onto the stage, where a sandbag in the middle is lifted up out of the way by the arrival of a black-clad villain wearing a pointed hat, ostensibly the very Phantom being investigated. "Aha!" exclaims the Inspector, "At last we meet, Mssr. Phantom, eh?" The Phantom is still holding the rope that he swung in on, but when the Inspector demands, "It will be wise if you cooperate," the Phantom holds both arms up in the air as if to give up, but he lets go of the rope and sandbag smashes the Inspector hard into the floor of the stage. The Phantom then exits stage right.

Later, the Inspector and Deaux-Deaux are chasing the Phantom through the city streets. The Phantom, naturally, runs right through the gates of the Paris Zoo. "We can trap him in there like a cag-ed animal!" exclaims the Inspector, perhaps a little too excitedly. The Phantom continues running straight into a large open cage and closes the gate behind him. The cops roll up to the cage, and the Inspector runs out to say, "Well, Mssr. Phantom. I see you've decided to give up your evil way of life and have put yourself behind bars. However, we have much better accommodations for you back at headquarters." The Inspector turns his head to order Deaux-Deaux to get the Commissioner on the carphone ("Sí, Inspector") but a large furry arm reaches out of the cage and whisks the Inspector between the bars.

Back at headquarters, the Commissioner receives the call and asks his Inspector is he was successful. Having been told that the Phantom and the escaped gorilla are one and the same, the Commissioner makes a horrible joke, laughing and saying, "You might say it was a case of a gorilla going 'ape' over opera music, eh, Inspector?" The Inspector isn't amused though, and tells the Commissioner that he simply can't bring the gorilla in to headquarters, because "he insists that I remain here and listen to his entire collection of opera music records!" The gorilla, smiling and still wearing his Phantom hat, sits happily leaning his arm on a large stack of records while another records spins on a turntable next to the Inspector. The End.

Cherche le Phantom is not nearly as fun for me as Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! As I mentioned, the villain turns out not to be so much a monster as it is an ordinary gorilla, albeit one who acts far more human than gorilla. While I am a huge fan of gorillas, being that the original 1933 King Kong is my very favorite film of all time, it is a bit of a downer to have the suggestion of a possible monster and it turns out to not be so. Acceptable in the consistently accepted tone of a series like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, where it is the basic gimmick that all suggested horrors are human-derived, but not in many other cases. On the other hand, the twist of a gorilla being the villain is lightly humorous, with the laugh coming the second we hear there is a breakout at the zoo and an opera house being menaced. The revelation of the twist is merely the punchline set up earlier, but I still wish the Phantom were in any way monstrous in nature.

This entry in the series has all the weaknesses of the Inspector series at large (relentlessly repeated gags from short to short so that there is little in the way of surprise; a sort of series ennui that sets in pretty early in its run) but also all the strengths (terrific voicework from Harrington, who plays most of the characters, and that fun, sketchy background style and mostly excellent character design). Overall, one doesn't have time to get too acquainted with the world of the Inspector because of how quick the entries are, and this may be why it is the weirder and more supernatural episodes that are the more memorable ones.

This short itself runs just under six minutes, and so while it would seem that the set-up and jokes would come hard and fast, this one drags a bit due to a long expository sequence at the beginning with the Commissioner, and we don't even get to the opera house until over three minutes, more than halfway. It is not hard to surmise there was a surfeit of quality gag ideas to use involving the gorilla/Phantom. And despite the opera setting, there are no jokes involving the art form itself, just a lot of running around on a stage. Not even the sets are employed.

And yet, I love the series as a whole. Even the more banal episodes, such as this one, are still fun to look at and the team of the Inspector and Deux-Deux usually doesn't fail to delight in some measure. Growing up watching these shorts on the many variations of The Pink Panther Show (and even in the Inspector's own slot from time to time), I have probably seen each one dozens of times in my life. Not counting that Rocky Horror viewing, I have recollections of seeing a few Inspector shorts (along with Pink Panthers and latter day Woody Woodpeckers) in regular theatrical viewings at the beginnings of features throughout the 1970s. The Inspector and his silly take on French police work were as familiar to me as any other animated character throughout my childhood, and I suspect that I will gain pleasure from the series for the rest of my life.

RTJ

*****

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