August 13th, 2021 
Michael Lyons 
Forget about a slasher in a hockey mask running amuck through a summer camp, the most impactful icon of the superstitions connected with Friday the 13th might just be a cute little kitten. In Bad Luck Blackie, the classic MGM cartoon from 1949, a kitten is befriended by the titular black cat, creating bad luck for a malicious bulldog. With Friday the 13th upon us, it’s the perfect day to celebrate this most celebrated short subject. Maybe watching it will bring some luck…or, at the very least, laughs.
In Bad Luck Blackie, a tiny white kitten is tormented by a bulldog bully (with a hearty, mean-spirited laugh). When it seems as if the poor, put-upon kitten just can’t take any more, he meets s street-smart black cat named Blackie.
Blackie appears wearing a bowler hat, rakishly tipped to one side, along with a knowing attitude, as he presents the kitten with a business card that reads: “Black Cat Bad Luck Company. Paths Crossed-Guaranteed Bad Luck.”
He also gives the kitten a whistle: simply blow it, and Blackie will cross the dog’s path, bringing bad luck to the sadistic canine.
Bad Luck Blackie was directed by the genius Tex Avery, who brings to this short what he brought to all of his work: turning all of the audiences’ expectations of cartoons on its head. The short was rightfully part of Jerry Beck’s 1994 book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons. Bad Luck Blackie came in at number fifteen on the list. In the book, film critic Jeff Miller summarizes Avery’s brilliance in the short, writing: “A man who would cheerfully end a piece in a galaxy three distant from the one in which he began lashed himself to a device which returned him again and again to The Rule: a black cat crosses your path, something bad will happen to you. Only after he narrows the parameters still further – something will fall on you – does Avery feel that his imagination is sufficiently challenged. Then he makes the customary Averian transposition of the sweet into the perverse and the villainous into the victim. And he begins.”
As Blackie continually crosses the dog’s path (with an instrumental version of “Comin’ Through the Rye” playing on the soundtrack), bad luck literally falls on the dog. Even toward the end of the short, when luck seems to have come back to the dog’s favor, things once again turn in a comedic twist.
The objects that fall on the dog start small (a flowerpot) and grow in size throughout so that by the end of the short, in superb Avery fashion, they have grown to impossible size (a battleship).
Through it all, there are brilliant touches that demonstrate why Avery was the maestro of exaggerated cartoon comedy: when a trunk falls on the dog as he descends a staircase, he takes on the shape of the stairs; and (in what may be the short’s funniest laugh), at one point, when the dog holds up a horseshoe for good luck, not only is he hit on the head by the horseshoe, but then three others and then the entire horse.
Over seventy years later, so many continue to marvel at Bad Luck Blackie. Like all of Avery’s films, there is cartoon, comedic craziness on the surface and so much more underneath, as author and animation historian John Canemaker observed in his 1996 book, Tex Avery. He said that “Bad Luck Blackie …may well be Avery’s masterpiece, a classically structured narrative about superstition and karma that confidently progresses the situation and gags to its inevitable conclusion.”
This Friday the 13th here is wishing you plenty of good luck that’s only a whistle away. (Below: an excerpt from the cartoons last two minutes):
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