Crumb first saw the film in February 1972, during a visit to Los Angeles with fellow underground cartoonists Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, and Rick Griffin. According to Bakshi, Crumb was dissatisfied with the film. Among his criticisms, he said that he felt that Skip Hinnant was wrong for the voice of Fritz, and said that Bakshi should have voiced the character instead. Crumb later said in an interview that he felt that the film was "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know. There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.  ... I didn't like that sex attitude in it very much. It's like real repressed horniness; he's kind of letting it out compulsively." Crumb also criticized the film's condemnation of the radical left, denouncing Fritz's dialogue in the final sequences of the film, which includes a quote from the Beatles song "The End", as "red-neck and fascistic" and stated, "They put words into his mouth that I never would have had him say."