If you’re of a certain age (and perhaps even young folks are included), you’ll know of the famous anti-marijuana movie “Reefer Madness” (1937; watch the whole thing here). Although that movie was dead serious in its ludicrous portrayal of the dangers of weed, people of my generation used to toke up and watch the thing completely baked, howling with laughter (and eating).
Here’s the new feline equivalent, appropriately matched (and cinematically degraded) to resemble the earlier film: “Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?” Make sure that your cats watch it!!!!
(It’s the brainchild of Jason Willis.)
h/t: Michael
I remember my teenage generation smoking Mary Jane for Disney’s Fantasia and “2001: A Space Odyssey” but I somehow missed the whole smokin for Reefer Madness scene.
Great vid. My son gave some to our cat some years ago. He ingested and walked with a wobble for about 15mins making weird loud sounds with wide pupils. He appeared to be chasing things that weren’t there and then slept for a couple of hours. He wasn’t given any more!
Willis I think is harking back to this 60’s stuff:-
Let’s scare the teens
Dragnet style 60’s cop drug training video
I love the authoritative voice-over man 🙂
With ours it’s just like having a bunch of drunken teenagers. Having rolled around on it for a while, they fight, and then they throw up. And they dunk their catnip cushions into their water bowls. Griefy scene, man …
This is very much like a 70’s style drug education film. I saw tons of very interesting movies like this in 7-10th grades. This was before the “Just Say No” era of the mid-80’s onward. The movies told you tthe facts and didn’t say that one usage of anything was going to ruin you forever like later media did.
I was already adjusting my mental model of you Jerry, until I realised I had misread ‘baked’ as ‘naked’.
Now that I look again, you didn’t actually confess to doing it yourself, either.
OK, but what does this gateway drug lead to?
Butter and I burned one.
The interesting thing about catnip is that the effects are so variable, some cats don’t respond to it at all, and others go quite loopy. Weird.
This video seems more of a parody of psychedelic drug psa’s (eg. “bad trip”). In any case, Hilarious!
I know… from the description, I was expecting a cat playing the piano with another one egging her on… “faster… play it faster…”
Ironically a real stoner would probably want the music to be slower and have more of a deep groove (so I’ve heard.)
Stephen, how did you cue the clip up in mid-stream? That is something I’ve been wanting to be able to do with YT clips for a while.
** Play the video & stop it at the appropriate moment
** Right-click the video screen & from the context menu that appears…
** Select “Copy video URL at current time”
** Paste
Thus for the above video I stopped it at 12 seconds & got this:-
That’s right. They couldn’t keep their drugs straight. (there was another similar film called something like “Cocaine Fiends”, but it’s not quite as noteworthy)
Notice that the URL that cues you (Michael Fisher’s example) ends with “#t=12s”. So another way of doing it is simply to append “#t=xxxs” to the URL, where xxx is the number of seconds into the video you’d like it to start.
I remember an episode of My World & Welcome To It starring William Windom where he gives his cat some catnip. The money line was “stoned out of his mind.”
While shopping for flowers and herbs at the Garden Center we came across Catnip!
Great idea!
Not a great idea!
We planted it out back and Kink came out to help. He loves to garden. Well, he got one whiff of the Catnip, dived into the flower bed and nuzzled all the leaves off. Six little plants mowed down by the Catwhacker.
I keep a tub of Catnip in the pantry to entice the cats to eat food they initially reject. I tried salsa and that didn’t work.
Oh, they are so funny – we had to hang our catnip up, because they ate it all, and each cat reacts differently. Some pretend they don’t feel a thing, while others lose all their catly dignity and roll on the floor like kittens.But they all enjoy it.
When I was in high school, circa 1970, we had regular drug education presided over by recovering drug abusers. They were all chain smokers.
My college general biology textbook was Biology Today. Extensive chapters on sex and drugs. No rock ‘n roll.
For those who don’t know, catnip is in the mint family, along with oregano and basil and thyme and a lot of other popular culinary herbs.
It’s easy to grow, and as invasive as any of the other mints — best kept in a pot lest it take over your whole garden.
It’s an attractive plant with mint-style blossoms that the bees love — not surprising, since bees love all the mints. And the leaves are tasty for humans; they should go nice in salads, would probably make a pleasant tea, and should be good for cooking. If it has any sort of psychoactive effect in humans, I’m not aware of it. As with the rest of the mints, the blossoms are as tasty as the leaves.
Once I’ve got the garden going and have a generous amount of it to harvest, I’ll probably make a small batch of savory ‘nip gelato that I suspect both Baihu and I will equally enjoy.
Cheers,
b&
For humans, catnip tea is used as a mild sedative, like chamomile. It isn’t as strong as passionflower or valerian root. As with all herbal remedies, your mileage may vary.
Catnip is native to Europe but has escaped from cultivation in the U.S. and grows wild in meadows and wood edges in the east and along streams in the west.
My Basement Cats enjoy it but if offered too frequently it induces bouts of territorial naughtiness, so they don’t get it very often. My little seizure guy isn’t allowed to have any. My torbie girl prefers desert beebush (Aloysia wrightii).
Re. Reefer Madness – 3yrs prior, a friend who had a large collection of 78’s taped this for me in among other great stuff from the late 20’s/early 30’s (still have the tapes but nothing to play them on). But it wasn’t till YT that I was able to see where it came from = Murder at the Vanities (1934): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnySJxE_XQA
My cat Max has never shown any interest when I tempt him with catnip but he often acts just like the stoned cats shown in the video. Maybe he has one of those “natural highs” we used to hear about in the ’60’s.
Jeez that looks like good stuff. Where can I score some? 😉
Reefer Madness can also be found on the Internet Archive, which is a great source for old movies, which have entered public domain.
http://archive.org/details/reefer_madness1938
I am surprised that no one has posted this yet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XqWC_c8lag
So I will
Sadly (or maybe luckily?), the queen of our household is unaffected by catnip. She does like wheatgrass, but just to nibble on. It does not have any intoxicating effects.
Apparently, about 1/3 of cats are not affected by catnip.
Interestingly, I have had the good fortune to have a friend who works at a ‘zoo’ conservation center in southern California, and we were given a behind the scenes tour once. The droppings of the fennel fox act like catnip to mountain lions, and it was quite entertaining to watch as the lioness rolled around, hung her tongue out, and generally acted goofy for a good 20 minutes. 🙂 Kittehs are kittehs, even when they are ~200 lbs…..
Nice use of singular they at the end.