Top Cat (Almost) Enters the New Millenium

 Unlike other Hanna-Barbera classics, Top Cat never got an all-new series. Yes, there were TV movies, crossovers, and those theatrical films produced for Mexico (Don't worry, I'll get to those later this month), but there weren't reboots and sequels like there was for something like The Flintstones. But that isn't to say they didn't give it the old college try. 

Above is an image of Top Cat as he was intended to look in a planned reboot of Top Cat Warner Brothers Animation was working on in the mid 2000s. These character designs were conceived by Dave Kupczyk, a Disney Renaissance animator who took on character design duties on several other shows from the era. You can check out all the designs on his blog here, but I thought I'd share some of the more interesting ones. T.C. himself isn't too much of a departure from the original, but now he sports a new hat and sunglasses.

One of those "interesting" designs is Officer Dibble, who has little in common with the original besides being a police officer. Judging by the character designs, it looks like a goal for this series was to modernize the characters, and Dibble here is the best indicator of that. Like I said, he doesn't really look like classic Dibble, but he does look like a modern police officer.

In addition to updating the existing characters, new ones were intended to appear alongside them. The most notable would be a girl cat named Roxy. What her role in the show would've been is unclear, but I imagine she would've been a new member of the gang.

Despite a whole roster of characters being designed, the show never came into being. If I had to say, WBA probably felt there wasn't enough "brand recognition" attached to the Top Cat IP to justify making a new series for it. Even the aforementioned theatrical films were only distributed by WB, not produced by them. But, going off the designs alone, would any of you have been interested in this series? The comments on Kupczyk's blogs are pretty 50/50, so I imagine that will be the case here.