USA: Jingle Cats! Jingle Cats! Jingle Cats! The holiday favourites rear their cuddly heads.

Just when you thought the holidays couldn't get any kitschier. Mike Spalla and his world famous "Jingle Cats" are at it again, and this time they have help from their furry canine friends to make this holiday season extra meow-velous! Spalla has been busy this year working on the new addition to the holiday tradition of cats meowing your favourite holiday tunes, and will release the new "Jingle Dogs" album this Christmas day. But the most popular divas in the recording studio are still the cats -- they've had preferential treatment for 13 years now, ever since Spalla's cat Binky happened to crawled up to a microphone and burst into song by chance. "Somebody called me up and wanted a recording of Jingle Bells, and I didn't have one so I was going to make one, I figured it was pretty easy, and so I came into my studio to record it, and I brought my cat with me, and I was working on it for about an hour, and the cat kind of disappeared and ran into the recording booth, and he sat on the chair, and he started meowing to me because he was lost, and what I was hearing were meows that were perfectly in tune with the music, and so I looked over at him, I hit the 'record' button, and I waved at him right on the beat and he would meow and I would wave and he would meow, and it sounded great to me," says Mike Spalla, creator of "Jingle Cats." Since then Spalla has had incredible global success after "Jingle Cats" became an internet download favorite, and over the years the franchise became more and more popular as music videos debuted and new recordings were made. The cats' most recent album, 2003's "Rhythm and Mews" is now included with the newest addition to the gang, the Binky Doll, which is modelled after the famous original "Jingle Cat" Binky. Binky is still with us today, and is a little cranky in the twilight of his years, but nevertheless a pro all the way. He and his pals are getting ready to film an upcoming "Jingle Cats" feature film set to be released in 2008 and starring the Jingle Dogs. "It's going to be a comedy, it's going to be all jokes, the cats with the dogs, just all jokes. I'm going to get the funniest writers in Hollywood and it's just going to be non stop jokes from beginning to end. And there are a lot of funny jokes with cats and dogs that you can do," says Mike Spalla. Spalla hopes "Jingle Dogs" will see as much success as their feline counterparts, and plans to give them an edgier sound. Their debut album will contain mostly dogs barking to dance music, but of course they won't forget the song that made them famous -- Jingle Bells, which is also included on the disc. Working with dogs proved to be much easier for Spalla, even though they will never hold the same place in his heart as the nine cats that inhabit his home and workspace. "The dog barks are easier to work with because they're just very precise and right on the beat, and the dogs have a lot of range too, they have a lot of howls and whimpers, and growling, and people like dogs barking music, they really do," says Mike Spalla. But for now, cats and dogs singing Christmas tunes will have to suffice, as they have for 13 years. So far, two million "Jingle Cats" albums have been sold worldwide, with the United States leading the consumption followed by Japan, Canada, Germany and Sweden. Since December of 2004, consumers have downloaded over 78,000 "Jingle Cats" and "Jingle Dogs" songs from the iTunes website.

ITN Source | December 14, 2006

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