>>102200908It's relatively unknown in the U.S. for the same reason that most 60s sitcoms aren't well-known: No airtime. It's never on TV. Even when it was in syndication, few stations actually picked it up.
It was never very popular. The one season it aired, it was already old hat. It was a note-for-note copy of the old Phil Silvers show ("You'll Never Get Rich"/"Sgt. Bilko"), which had died from acute lack of ratings a few years earlier. But though it copied the scam-artist plots (and Daws Butler did his usual magic copying the voices), it couldn't recreate the sense of fun and outrage. It was too watered-down.
There's more to it. The Phil Silvers show was a very specific kind of "sleazy trickster" storytelling. Bilko used his wits to cheat, bamboozle, bilk, and otherwise take advantage of ordinary people. The rules of society were for suckers. The only reason he's not an evil character is because he's a buffoon we can laugh at.
Such characters are popular when cultural norms keep you down or keep you out. Think "Br'er Rabbit" among American slaves. When rules repress, you cheer for the guy who gets around them and gets ahead. But when people think their cultural norms are good, it's hard to sympathize with a character who ignores the rules and fucks people over.
Silvers' show barely scraped the top 30 in its first two seasons in the mid-50s, mostly for outrageousness and novelty. But when the novelty wore off, ratings plummeted among the middle-class majority. NBC scored by buying the rights and airing daytime reruns, when the middle class was at the office. But even that didn't last. This kind of humor just stopped being funny… BEFORE Top Cat even aired. It's amazing it even lasted a whole season.
Perhaps Top Cat (and more mean-spirited Woody Woodpecker) is popular in other countries where it's easier to sympathize with him. In the U.S. Top Cat is just blah, and Woody is downright cringeworthy, but in other societies they might be characters to cheer for.
