- by Owen Morton
Chances are you think the above title is a product of my deranged mind. The fact of the matter is, however, that it’s a product of somebody else’s. I don’t know if anyone actually remember Samurai Pizza Cats – I don’t, as will become abundantly clear over the course of this article – but rest assured, this mind-wrenchingly imbecilic title is actually the title of a cartoon that graced our screens in the early 1990’s. I believe it was the next after Turtles in the never-ending sequence of stupid cartoons that we were all subjected to in our formative years. However, I think that at the time when Samurai Pizza Cats had gone on the air, it was no longer cool to watch such rubbish. (Admittedly, it was no longer cool the year before with Turtles either, but the fact of the matter with the Turtles was that you knew all your friends watched it too, even though it wasn’t cool. By the time of Samurai Pizza Cats, I believe watching cartoons like this had lost both the coolness factor and the actual inclination to watch it, whereas the only thing missing with Turtles was the coolness factor. This could lead to interesting conversations with your friends along the lines of, “Did you see Turtles last night?” “… No.” “… Me neither.” “… It was quite good though, wasn’t it?”)
Anyway, you might ask why I’m writing a website article about something I never watched and have absolutely no knowledge of. I’ll have to explain that the only reason is that – given that I don’t want the website to become over-saturated with He-Man articles, which is always the danger – I keep on trying to think of new things to discuss. Okay, today I was a little stuck, which is why the only thing that popped into my head was Samurai Pizza Cats, but having suddenly remembered this name, I endeavoured to go and do some research about this programme and find out a little about it, and then write an article to let you know what I discovered.
As it happened, my research was a little cursory, consisting as it did of typing “Samurai Pizza Cats” into Google, and investigating the first three or four websites it came up with. Still, I thought that since, recently, my articles have been sadly lacking in pictures, I’d nick a couple off these websites and put them on mine, just so you could all see pictures of Samurai Pizza Cats in all their pride and glory. And here’s the first one:
These three interesting fellows are, I believe, the Samurai Pizza Cats themselves. At a wild guess, I’d say that the one on the left is female, because it’s just got that kind of poise, and facial expression. The one on the right appears to be holding something very much akin to a large red umbrella, for reasons which I suppose might become clear if ever I were to watch the cartoon. The one in the middle is probably the boss, though again I can’t say this for certain. From looking at the picture, I am at a loss to explain why these creatures should be termed as “samurai” or “pizza” (or, if I wanted to be really scathing, “cats”, but I don’t think we’ll go into that). However, from some of the info I read on the internet about this programme, I believe I can go some way towards explaining this conundrum.
As far as I could make out from the extremely brief reading I did on the subject (extremely brief because, contrary to popular opinion, I do actually have better things to do than this), the Samurai Pizza Cats were the owners of a pizza establishment. It has always puzzled me how, in cartoons, creatures other than humans can own shops, and humans will go in and use the service provided without thinking anything of it. I don’t know about you, but if I went to a pizza place and was served by a cat – even if it was a Samurai Pizza Cat (or perhaps especially if it was such) – I’d begin to suspect that something slightly out of the ordinary was going on. Quite why the Samurai Pizza Cats felt it necessary to run a pizza place is also perhaps a matter for debate. Still, they weren’t just pizza cooks, otherwise it would have been a really boring cartoon (after the initial novelty of cats cooking pizzas wore off, of course). The Samurai Pizza Cats were also secretly acting to protect the world from the forces of Evil!
It is with this evil-fighting revelation that I presume the samurai aspect of their personalities came into play. It is unlikely that they would fight evil with their pizza-cooking abilities, unless, of course, they were really bad at cooking pizzas, and defeated the forces of evil by poisoning them with badly-cooked pizza. I feel that that would be too surreal, even for a programme entitled Samurai Pizza Cats. Plus, of course, if that were the case, there would be no need for them to be called Samurai Pizza Cats. They’d just be Pizza Cats, which probably wouldn’t strike fear into an enemy’s heart the way the phrase Samurai Pizza Cats, em, does. So, one presumes that when evil threatens the world, the Samurai Pizza Cats emerge from their small Italian eatery, brandishing samurai swords (and possibly red umbrellas) and go to combat whatever needs combating.
It should probably at this point be revealed what it is that usually needs combating. The main baddy in this series is called – and I assure you, I am not making this up – the Big Cheese. Here is a picture of him:
From what I was reading, the Big Cheese has an assistant, whose name – being as it is Geri Atrics – is most amazingly amusing and had me laughing out loud in the computer room for about seventeen minutes before finally a man in a white coat came and confidentially advised me to shut the fuck up. This I did, and returned to the serious business of researching for website articles about Samurai Pizza Cats. (I still can’t believe I’m writing this. I really can’t.) I never actually found out what the Big Cheese’s motives were – trying to discover this would have required reading the paragraph involving Geri Atrics, which would no doubt have resulted in my being taken away by the men in white coats, all because people don’t like it when other people laugh too much – but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d suggest they were something along the lines of,
1. Dominate the world.
2. Destroy those pesky Samurai Pizza Cats once and for all.
though not necessarily in that order. In fact, most probably not in that order, given that – if I’m not very much mistaken – the Samurai Pizza Cats were the only thing preventing him from achieving Objective Number One.
Now, considering I’ve never actually seen this programme, I think I’m doing a fairly good job of spinning this article out for as long as I have. But don’t worry, we’re not coming to an end yet: I have still one more point to make. Some of you may be familiar with an internet site which is called Blackstar.co.uk or .com, I’m not sure which, which sells old videos of stupid programmes, like the Hair Bear Bunch, for example, at frankly extortionate prices. One of the links on Google I found to Samurai Pizza Cats led me directly to the Blackstar page, where on offer was a video of (you guessed it) Samurai Pizza Cats, at the very reasonable price of £9.99. Here is a picture of what you get for your money:
It all looks very reasonable, doesn’t it? Even quite good really. (That’s sarcasm, by the way.) My eyes, however, were caught by the little phrase at the bottom. Now, I do realise that the picture quality isn’t that great, and so the writing isn’t too clear, but as far as I can tell, it says “Over 10 minutes of fur-flying action!” This seems to be implying that you would be paying ten quid for about eleven minutes worth of videotape. Eleven minutes of Samurai Pizza Cats is worth ten quid? I have my doubts. I have very serious doubts, in fact. However, I’m not going to ever find out if my doubts are justified, because to do that, I’d have to actually spend that ten quid, and – being a right miser – I’m not really willing to do that. (In my defence, though, I have to say that I would imagine even people who aren’t right misers would think twice before splashing out £9.99 on something like this.)
Okay, now I have said all I can say about the Samurai Pizza Cats, so I think I’ll stop this article right here, and go to do something useful. Getting some food sounds like a good idea.