MovieChat Forums > Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) Discussion > Where did he get 'Cat-Women'?

Where did he get 'Cat-Women'?


Only late in this movie does Kip (Victor Jory) more or less routinely and non-chalantly refer to the females running the moon as "the cat-women". He uses the term exactly twice, almost as an afterthought. Nobody questions who he's talking about, where he dug that term up or anything. Nobody even seems to take any notice of his sudden use of the phrase -- as if the girls were identified as "cat-women" as soon as they met them. So? Where did he come up with that name, and why doesn't anyone make anything of it...like saying, "Cool name, Kip!" or something?

And calling Victor Jory Kip??? Kip was your boarding school classmate who captained the debate team -- but definitely not Victor Jory!

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Glad you brought this up. By the sound of your subject line, I thought you were asking where the phrase 'cat women' was used. So I looked for it in the only place I remembered hearing it, which was at 48:17. Where was the other mention?

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Near the very end, when they suddenly wrap everything up abruptly, probably because they were running out of film. If I recall it correctly, Doug (William Phipps) is holding the dead Lambda in his arms in the cave when from off-screen comes the voice of Victor Jory (I think -- it might have been Sonny Tufts), calling out, "The cat-women are dead and Helen's all right!" And we just wrapped up the entire picture without showing any action!

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Thanks. I have it on DVD, so I'll check it out tonight. Btw, I used to know a guy named Kip. A Korean kid. He looked more like somebody named Kip than Victor Jory did. I mean, you just don't name tough guys Kip. Or worse yet, Kyle.

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Hey, uptown -- glad to hear from you after six months. Yes, let me know what you find. I knew a Kip, too -- very un-Jory-like. Had no affinity for cats either.

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Allow me to submit this response: because the Selene women wore tights -- catsuits.

Or it could be because they had the Men on the Moon running around like mice.

What a great double feature that would have made:

Cat Women of the Moon with Mouse on the Moon (1963)!

I know, the latter was released nine years later, but you know about the nine lives, so...

Please! Save the catty rebuttals!

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The Golden Turkey Awards had another explanation for the girls' nomenclature: since they wore eye shadow that gave them a slightly feline look, one of the spacemen decides to cal them "Cat Women". The book also referred to them as B-girls in leotards, and since "leotard" is reminiscent of "leopard", voila, encore, "Cat Women".

I do like your proposed double feature. (Minor piece of pedantry: Mouse on the Moon was released ten, not nine, years after CWOTM -- you're quite right, a cat has only nine lives, so there'd be nothing but cat-women corpses for the mice to gnaw on -- is that disgusting enough a concept for you?) However, be careful what you wish for: after all, it's bad enough that this film has a remake, Missile to the Moon, which manages to be decidely worse. A triple feature?

Anyway, didn't Tom and Jerry get there first?

Or was it Andrew Lloyd Webber?

And what do we do about Sonny Tufts?



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Glad to have you back.

You know, when I was a boy, Los Angeles had a newpaper (Herald-Examiner) that, like most papers had a handy TV guide in the Sunday edition. Well, it used to list movies starring Mr. Tufts and it would always be so:

Cat Women on the Moon (1953) Victor Jory, Marie Windsor and Sonny Tufts! (2 hours)

Always with an exclamation point. Didn't matter the movie, always with the exclamation point!

Whatever the reason, Cat Women on the Moon is a neat title for a movie.

And speaking of the re-make, I always liked Missile to the Moon (1958). Hot-cha-cha!

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We've had some interesting discussions about Missile to over on its site...a lot to do with Rock Creatures. Especially colorized ones. Don't know why they didn't have a snazzy name for the ladies on luna in that one. "Moon people" or something catchy instead. The leader was named "The Lido", probably because in her younger days she was considered quite a cookie.

But I confess to liking the Cat Women better. Hey, as confessions go, that's akin to acknowledging kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

Also, there are lots of great goofs posted for MTTM, more howlers even than on CWOTM...most placed there by yours truly, natch. (Now there's a real coot word.)

Speaking of which, we've made nary a comment on any film starring Robert Coote. Ah, well. Scientific discourses on the moon are far more elucidating.

Try this one:

Uhny-Uftz!

Ring a bell?

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Well, whip my back and call me Quasi, Modo. Nope, can't say it rings any bells.

Scientific lingo, eh? Sounds like "Sonny Tufts" with a mouthful of dry oatmeal. Ah, but what do I know? I never got one of those fancy University educations. But I was a graduate with Jethro Bodine. I don't know how to write, but I can trace!

I'll just haul my uneducated carcass to Misiile to the Moon!

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Well, I'll be *beep* You may not know it, but graduate of Marie Windsor University or not, you actually -- if it really was accidentally -- hit precisely upon what I was alluding to! Truly amazing.

"Uhny-Uftz" was the name of an episode of the old Dick Van Dyke Show, one I believe from 1963. In it, Rob thinks he sees a flying saucer hovering over his office building when he's working very late one night. The saucer makes this ridiculous sound -- Uhny-Uftz. When he tells Buddy and Sally about it they of course think he imagined or dreamed it, and when he insists he not only really saw it, but that it talked, they definitely think he's gone off the deep end. Buddy asks him what it said, and as he tries to recall the "words", he stops and says, "It sounded like 'Sonny Tufts'." Sally then walks over to him and says, "Rob, you didn't see a flying saucer." "Why not?" "Because if one of those things ever came down here, do you think the first person they'd ask to see would be Sonny Tufts?"

This, of course, was during that period when Sonny Tufts's very name had become a standard comedian's joke, one guaranteed to bring down the house, so it meant something to audiences in '63. (It turns out Rob had of course really seen a saucer; a few nights later Buddy hears it too, and when he and Rob go exploring through the building they discover two men developing a toy saucer for Christmas. When Rob asks them what "Uhny-uftz" means, the scientist says, "It means we have failed," and the worker with him tells them, "It's supposed to say, 'Merry Christmas'!")

So, without benefit of oatmeal, you have nevertheless immediately pulled the correct answer out of thin air -- as thin as the air in the Cat Women's caverns, or the scriptwriters' offices. You now get your degree -- but from Tufts University, of course...which, indeed and in fact, really was founded by one of Sonny's considerably more illustrious (if less immortal) ancestors.

Me-yoww!!

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Very funny. I seem to think I remember that episode, but I may be confusing it with the one about the walnut invasion and the eye on the back of Laura's head.

Tufts University. My heart is full...

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A few points I feel the urge to make...

By the way, this is the poster who used to post under uptowndave-1. I just changed my handle.

"Missile to the Moon" was crap. Hey, I love and adore the "so bad, it's good" b-movies. But "Missile to the Moon" was so bad, it was crap. And if a movie was made today with men wearing the same short pants worn on MTTM, they would undoubtedly be flaming gay characters.

About Sonny Tufts... he was a drunk in real life. Look it up, lol. There's a story about how someone found him lying down on Sunset Blvd, completely hammered and at the end of his rope. I don't remember what happened to him after that, and I don't remember if this was before or after the making of CWOTM. I have a hunch that this happened before the movie was made, and he grabbed the role out of sheer desperation.

Tom and Jerry? Did you know the cat and mouse weren't the original Tom and Jerry duo? If you're into old, old cartoons, do a search for Van Beuren's Tom and Jerry. This was a series of cartoons, made in the early 30s, about a "Mutt and Jeff" type of duo. The main characters were also known as Dick and Larry at some point. Wikipedia has an article on them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry_(Van_Beuren). If you look around on YouTube or archive.org, you'll see a few of the cartoons.

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Missile to the Moon was bad, but we find it very enjoyably bad. But why bring MTTM up on this thread, dedicated to the virtually-as-bad Cat-Women of the Moon? We need to spread these posts around between these two cinematic greats.

However, no one in MTTM wore shorts -- not the men, not even the women. The men all (and always) wore regular khaki pants, full-length. I think you might be conflating your lunar movie images: the men (and women) did wear shorts in another 1953 moon flick, Project Moonbase. But no lunar civilization, B-girls in cat costumes, rock men or drunken Sonny having to be scraped off the moon's linoleum surface in that one.

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You're absolutely right about MissIle to the Moon/Project Moonbase. I realized my error late last night, but didn't have time to correct my post. MissIle to the Moon is indeed an enjoyably bad flick. Moonbase was the one I was thinking of. The fact that you caught that error shows that you know your movies.

Spreading the posts around is something I agree with, but sometimes you gotta make comparisons between different movies. That way, the readers can learn about flicks with similar plots, characters, etc. I pretty much cut my teeth on this site, from reading comparative comments.

--
"This is Rocky Jones of the Space Rangers reporting..."

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Been away for a few weeks, so just catching up. I was being a bit facetious about spreading the comments around, though that is a necessity too!

But thank you for your compliment about knowing my movies...well, I take it as a compliment. I'm sure some people would deem knowing a lot about CWOTM a sign of some sort of dementia!

Have you looked in on the posts about Project Moonbase? More fun to be had there.

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If you have ever seen a girl's halloween cat costume it usually looks like the leotard outfits in this movie - without the tail of course. Maybe that's why he called them cat women.

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