Jingle Cats put their spin on ‘Feliz Navidad’
Posted December 22, 2011 8:13 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It wouldn’t be a cat-tastic holiday season without a new song from the Jingle Cats: the Kittens, who first meowed their way onto the music scene in 1992 with the Jingle Bells medley on a cassette.
This year Mike Spalla’s Jingle Cats are back to celebrate another holiday season with a new music video. Spalla, who first conducted the Jingle Cats to fame back in 1992, has created a new music video with a cat version of the popular Feliz Navidad.
“Well, this year the Jingle Cats are singing one of the greatest songs of all time, Feliz Navidad, and it’s the Jingle Cats singing with the Jingle Dogs. And, it’s really interesting because the cats are singing some of the musical instruments parts and the dogs are also doing that and then the lead parts are sung by the cats and the dogs.
But it really sounds great,” said Spalla.
He’s also releasing 100 songs on Google Music, including a few that have never been released.
The cats, along with their record label mates the Jingle Dogs, and the now retired Jingle Babies, have become a bit of an international phenomenon.
Their songs have been featured in several major films, including 2007’s Fred Claus starring Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti. According to Spalla, they’ve also sold more than 2 million albums worldwide. The Jingle Cats and Dogs’ DVDs and albums are available at www.jinglecats.com.
The Los Angeles-based sound engineer has also made a deal with Hallmark for the cats and dogs to cover Happy Birthday on more than 500,000 greeting cards, which have sold successfully. Spalla hopes the sales will one day lead to his original idea for the singing cats, a yearly holiday special.
“My original idea was that the jingle cats would be a T.V. special that runs at Christmas time so, I’m still hoping to get to that,” said Spalla.
Spalla hopes that next year the furry adventure, Jingle Cats 3D, which he began filming last year, will be ready for a Christmas release. The creative musician is working with a team of cameramen and 3D cameras, which have been provided by Panasonic, for the film.
