Rafeefleas

After spending the night in a museum case, Benny leaves the Modern Museum of Ancient Art with a priceless Egyptian scarab pinned to his jacket. Thinking it's a bauble, Top Cat offers it to Fancy-Fancy to use in impressing the lady cats. But soon the gang realizes the jewel is genuine, and they sneak back into the museum to return it. They are caught by Dibble, who charges them with stealing the entire collection. While the cats try to straighten the situation out, the real jewel thief appears and is apprehended.

Teaser Sequence: While playing golf in the alley, Top Cat tells the cats that they got to capture a clever, notorious international jewel thief or he'll give the neighborhood a bad name. Top Cat hits his golf ball and Brain runs over with a shovel and digs a hole rapidly and gets a flag stick. The ball lands in the hole and Brain says "A hole in...duh... one."

Top Cat, Spook, Benny the Ball, Choo Choo, The Brain, Spook, Fancy-Fancy, Officer Charlie Dibble, Patrick Dibble, Shirley, Jewel Thief, Reporters

In the scene in the museum, Choo-Choo points out to Top Cat at Fred and Barney from "The Flintstones" as caveman statues while their music underscore is briefly used.

Top Cat has the distinction of being one of the few animated series to debut in prime time. After one season, it was moved to Saturday mornings, and was met with huge success.

Essentially, Hanna-Barbera took Phil Silvers' popular character from the hit prime-time sitcom Sgt. Bilko and turned him into a cat. T.C. and the gang (Benny, Choo Choo, Fancy-Fancy, Spook, and The Brain) lived on the streets of Manhattan and were always in search of a free lunch, figuratively and literally. Their main obstacle was Officer Dibble, who had an extreme dislike for the crafty cat and his schemes, especially when they involved using the police phone for personal calls. The Sgt. Bilko connection was strengthened by the fact that Maurice Gosfield, who played Doberman on the sitcom, voiced Benny, T.C's right hand cat.

Like The Flintstones, Top Cat was written for adults and children alike, since it was initially shown during the family hour on a weeknight. This particular programming effort made the scripts stronger than your average cartoon, relying less on overused cartoon cliches and more on character. Unfortunately, T.C. didn't do well in prime time, but when he and the gang moved to Saturday mornings, the show found a loyal audience, who still remember it fondly.

The name of this show became "Boss Cat" when it ran in the United Kindgom to avoid confusion with a British cat food called Top Cat.