Tom Poes on the Disney Channel

Dwight Decker deckerd at agcs.com
Tue Nov 15 22:33:06 CET 1994


David Gerstein asked about my statement that I had seen
a Tom Poes movie on the Disney Channel. I'd guess it
was about four years ago (I haven't had cable since
moving to Arizona from Chicago three and a half years
ago). The movie's American title was something on the
order of "The Dragon Who Thought He Wasn't (Or Was He)".
Our Dutch friends will recognize the original Dutch
title of "Als Je Begrijp Wat Ik Bedoel" ("If you get
what I mean" -- one of the recurring phrases in the
Tom Poes strip). It's not a very good movie, and
unbelievably the American releasing company changed
not only Tom Poes's name (to "Kitkat") but made him
female!
	Tom Poes is a Dutch newspaper comic strip by
Marten Toonder that has appeared in Holland since
the late '30s. In line with Dutch tradition, the
newspaper strip doesn't have word balloons but
consists of three wordless panels with typeset
narrative text and dialogue underneath. The
strip is very well written and even though it's
a comic strip about anthropomorphic animals who
talk and wear clothes, it's considered an authentic
expression of Dutch literature in some quarters.
Tom Poes ("Tom Poes") is a white cat that is
nominally the star of the strip, but it has long
since been taken over by his comic-relief sidekick,
a wealthy, pompous bear named Olivier Bommel (some
people call collections of the strip "Bommel-Boeken").
While the newspaper strip had the odd hybrid format
of pictures and text, Toonder's studio also produced
serialized comic-book stories in standard word-balloon
format for the weekly Donald Duck comic book, one of
the few examples of non-Disney material in a Disney
comic that I can think of (though no doubt people on
the disney-comics list can help me on this point).
The comic-book Tom Poes stories have been collected in
album format over the years and I've read about eight
of them. Large panels, minimal dialogue, simple
stories, but often beautiful artwork. The stories could
be a little strange at times, in the sense of downright
surreal. The best Tom Poes stories appeared in the
newspaper strip, but I think American audiences would
find the unusual format offputting; the comic-book
stories, on the other hand, would surely go over nicely
here. Toonder competes successfully with Disney in the
funny-animal domain, I think, with a flavor all his own.

--Dwight Decker




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