Beans the Cat is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Cartoons series of cartoons from 1935–1936. Beans was the third Warner Bros cartoon character star after Bosko and Buddy. He is voiced by Billy Bletcher and occasionally by Tommy Bond. He was created by director Friz Freleng. The character was featured in nine cartoons made in 1935 and 1936. History When the cartoon animators/directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising left producer Leon Schlesinger in 1933, they took their main creation, Bosko, with them to Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Desperate to maintain his contract with Warner Bros., Schlesinger founded an animation studio of his own, Leon Schlesinger Productions, to produce new Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons in-house and collected employees from Disney, Ub Iwerks, and other animation studios. Schlesinger set up his new studio on the Warner Bros. lot, on Sunset Boulevard. Among the staff Schlesinger had accrued was Tom Palmer, a former Disney animator who was appointed director of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Schlesinger intended to effectively compete with Disney and Fleischer Studios, and he needed a continuing, star character to compete with Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. Palmer introduced Buddy to be that character. Like Bosko and Mickey, Buddy had a girlfriend and a pet dog as supporting characters. The Buddy character, however, was not a success and Palmer was fired after completing two short films for Schlesinger. Following the departure of Palmer's replacement, Earl Duvall, Schlesinger ran short of directors (composer Bernard B. Brown even receiving credits for directing two Merrie Melodies shorts) and began to search for new directors to effectively keep the Schlesinger studio afloat. According to animation historian Michael Barrier, all the animated short films produced by the Schlesinger studio under its early directors lacked in cuteness and charm of any kind and were frequently incoherent. The shorts of this period had much smaller production budgets than their main competitor, Disney. By 1934, Schlesinger had assigned directorial duties on the Merrie Melodies series to former Harman-Ising animator Friz Freleng, and the Looney Tunes series to Jack King. Schlesinger tasked the two with creating new characters to replace the sterile Buddy, and the two created a group of anthropomorphic animals to show to Schlesinger, which included Beans, a mischievous cat, Little Kitty, a female cat and Beans' love interest, twin puppies named Ham and Ex, Oliver Owl, a stubborn, spectacled owl, and Porky, a