From UPA’s “Bringing Up Mother” (1954)
“Motherhood-It’s the biggest on-the-job training program in existence today”. – Author and humorist Erma Bombeck. Indeed, this is true. And, this weekend, we get to celebrate all who have endured this lifelong “on-the-job training” for us on Mother’s Day.
Continuing a tradition from 2021 and 2025, what follows are some additional classic cartoon shorts that are perfect for Mother’s Day (three of them suggested by Cartoon Research readers).
Mother Hen’s Holiday, Columbia, (1937)
Here is a classic “Color Rhapsody” from Columbia, set on Mother’s Day.
As the short opens, we meet the Mother Hen (voiced by Toby Wing) who is singing about how much she has to do and how tired she is, and we can see why – she is mom to so many little chicks, they almost overflow out of the baby carriage.
It’s soon evident why she is so overwhelmed, as, once back home, the endless number of little chicks causes chaos in the house, creating absolute destruction. However, they then spot the calendar and note that it’s Mother’s Day.
The chicks then decide to do all they can for mom, cleaning and repairing the house. They even bake a cake and feed it to their happy Mother Hen, as the short ends.
Directed by Arthur Davis, Mother Hen’s Holiday features some nice sight gags, particularly during the sequences where the chicks trash the house, all set against lovely backgrounds.
It all has a cozy, classic cartoon tone, and a nice sentiment for Mother’s Day, as one of the little chicks state: “Make every day a Mother’s Day, not only once a year, every day in every way, cheer up mother dear, for everything you’ve done for us, perhaps we can repay, by making every single day a Happy Mother’s Day.”
Horton Hatches the Egg, Warner Bros., (1942) – suggested by Frederick Weigand
Initially published as a book by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), in 1940, the book’s popularity eventually brought it to Warner Bros. as an animation project.
Horton Hatches the Egg tells the tale of Horton (Kent Rogers), an elephant who is tricked into sitting on an egg in a nest when the mother, Mayzie (Sara Berner), decides to rest and go on vacation. Horton endures several challenges: stormy weather, ridicule from other animals, hunters, and life in the circus.
Through it all, the steadfast elephant never leaves the egg, keeping his promise to Mayzie and repeatedly stating (in true Seuss rhyme), “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”
The Warner Bros. artists remained close to the book. In fact, they wrote and sketched ideas for the short, right on the pages as they adapted them. Director Robert Clampett and his team, which included Robert McKimson, Bill Melendez, and Virgil Ross, inserted their unique brand of humor, which includes moments where Mayzie breaks into a brief impression of Katherine Hepburn.
Like the book upon which it is based, Horton Hatches the Egg is an innocent, endearing tale about nurturing and loyalty that is perfect for Mother’s Day, “one hundred percent.”
Bringing Up Mother, UPA (1954) – also suggested by Frederick Weigand
In a film noir-style opening, a police car drives slowly through the night street, calling all cars to be on the lookout for a John Smith. The shadow of a figure walking along a street passes by. He narrates: “Yeah, it’s me they want. I’m the guy, alright. But what could I do? She drove me to it. It was the only way out, and I took it.”
What we come to see through flashbacks is that this isn’t a thriller, and that isn’t the talk of a man who committed a crime, but instead a young boy who has run away from home, after his parents bring home his baby brother from the hospital, and the attention he received has shifted.
Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending: the police find John and cheerfully bring him home. But in the flashbacks throughout the short, the audience gets sharply written insight (by Tedd Pierce and director William Hurtz) into the relationship between the young boy and his mother, dating back to his infancy.
This includes a scene where Johnny, wearing a sailor hat and sucking his thumb, is told by his mother that “sailors don’t suck their thumbs.” So, Johnny proceeds to take off his sailor hat. In his full cowboy outfit and playing with his friend (in the role of the horse), Johnny is told by his mother that they’re “going to have a little baby to play with.” “I’d rather have a horse,” replies Johnny.
But when he’s promised a baby sister (which he’s excited for, as there will be a cowgirl in the house) and instead gets a baby brother, that’s when he runs away.
The short has a wonderful, stylish design, by Robert Danko, in everything from backgrounds to characters, that is such a part of all UPA did, and is coupled with great voice work from Jerry Hausner as Johnny, Marvin Miller as the friendly police officer and Marian Richman as mom.
Bringing Up Mother is a great tribute to all mothers and what they deal with while raising one child, with another on the way.
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, “Jeepers, It’s the Creeper,” (1970) – suggested by Christopher Cook
There’s a slight Mother’s Day connection here, but a fun one, nonetheless. As Scooby and the gang look to hide from the ghoulish Creeper, Scooby (Don Messick) and Shaggy (Casey Kasem) sneak into in a chicken house. Scooby sits on an egg, which hatches, and the little chick imprints on Scoob, thinking he’s his mom.
The chick even begins barking and spends the remainder of the episode on Scooby’s nose (even when Scooby reveals the real identity of the creeper, at the end).
“Jeeper’s, It’s the Creeper” is an entertaining Scooby-Doo episode that offers a maternal subplot for those who crave classic Saturday morning memories.
Here’s the clip from the episode where the chick adopts Scooby Doo as his mother:
• If this clip isn’t enough for you and you need to see the whole episode – you can wait for it to come around on MeTV Toons – or you can buy the complete series on blu ray – or you can watch a slanted version of it online at DailyMotion.
Feel free to suggest some of your favorite cartoon shorts and episodes for Mother’s Day in the comments, and here’s wishing all a very Happy Mother’s Day.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
The exploits of Horton are more fully explored in the musical “Seussical” which after a not-too-successful run on Broadway is now gathering momentum among community theatre and high school productions. It’s cleverly written, using the words of Dr. Seuss whenever possible. And Horton is one of the main characters, along with Mayzie and Gertrude McFuzz. Plus, of course, the Cat in the Hat.
Another tribute to mothers that I did not mention before is the Jonny Quest movie “Jonny’s Golden Quest” in which his mother is introduced for the first time in a prequel that shows what became of her and how Dr. Quest became a widower. Although in some ways a painful story, it’s handled with diplomacy and taste.
“Horton” also mixes in the WB style by having Maizie look more like Daffy Duck painted blue than the Seuss original. One of the hunters looks like Elmer Fudd but with a fringe of hair instead of being completely bald. The gag of the hunters singing the “Volga Boatmen” song in Russian is a nod to wartime humor, when things “Russian” were in vogue as a sign of support for then-ally USSR. And then there’s the Peter Lorre fish, who gets censored from a lot of TV prints
Actually, they even planned a Bugs Bunny cameo according to the original script, but it was eventually scrapped.
To me, the most amazing part of Horton (an excellent adaption) is the Peter Lorre-channeling fish/suicide gag.
I’ll just leave this here….https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/594594/s03-e23-the-blessed-event
I assume that our writer here didn’t mention the suicide gag because Warner’s has removed it. After all, it’s common knowledge that many people have committed suicide after being influenced by hand-drawn fish.
It’s also common knowledge that many people begin to lose one eye, join the navy and start dating skinny women after being influenced by cartoon sailors.
The suicide of a loved one is a very traumatic thing to have to deal with, and many people are understandably distressed to see the issue made light of in such a tasteless and callous manner. The fish gag isn’t in the original Dr. Seuss book, but you can find the exact same “joke” in any number of other Bob Clampett cartoons, if that’s the sort of thing that tickles your funny bone.
The suicide “gag” really stands out as not being Seuss-like, something that I noticed even as a small child watching this cartoon. The local (N.Y.C.) station that showed it obviously didn’t censor their print. While Dr. Seuss has since been criticized for presenting some racial stereotypes in his stories— offensive today, but nothing unusual for the time— he was never one to introduce minor characters just to kill them off!
“The suicide of a loved one is a very traumatic thing to have to deal with, and many people are understandably distressed to see the issue made light of in such a tasteless and callous manner.”
Personally (and I mean NO ill will towards suicide victims no anyone whose had to deal with them as well) I think the cartoon has nothing to do with the personal viewpoint of the person. There’s a difference between cartoon violence and real life violence and we all understand that it’s alright to laugh at cartoon violence but not real life violence. Just my two cents.
“Bringing Up Mother” is an example of how UPA attempted to expand the boundaries of animation, not only stylistically, but also in terms of the types of stories that could be explored in this format, such as this chronicle of family life. I also believe this to be the first animated film to deal with pregnancy realistically, including the representation of the mother pregnant and in the postpartum period.
The wall calendar in “Mother Hen’s Holiday” accurately represents the time of its release: Mother’s Day really fell on the 9th of May in 1937. The Hindenburg disaster took place just three days earlier.
Otherwise, there are very few classic animated shorts in which a mother is the central figure. As in the children’s stories upon which so many of them were based, cartoons normally had mothers playing ancillary roles, to scold or punish a juvenile protagonist or to complain that someone has been eating her porridge. Even Mother Goose and Old Mother Hubbard are better known for the pets they kept than for the children they raised. Sad to say, for much of animation history motherhood was shown to be of far lesser import than that most exalted of family relationships: the bond between an uncle and his identical nephews.
The most touching depiction of motherhood in classic animation, by far, would have to be Walt Disney’s “Bambi”. Nothing else even comes close. For those of us whose mothers are no longer with us, those scenes of Bambi and his mother are all the more poignant. Love is a song that never ends….
I’m surprised no one has brought up Max Fleischer’s classic “Color Classic”, “The Kids In the Shoe” – one of the few films of the series to do a good job of balancing and maintaining the house style over and above the attempts to rival Disney. The character of the Old Woman in the Shoe was common in short glimpses in various Mother Goose toons from nearly every studio, but this one is probably the only one where we get to spend an entire day with her, and look past the exterior shoelaces to see just how she manes to get her brood fed, washed, and settled down to bed at night (The only thing we missed was seeing her slave over a hot stove or fireplace to cook the broth.) The film’s wild musical romp finale, set to the tune “Mama Don’t Allow It”, is pure Fleischer and sincerely funny, as the kids make a wreck of the communal bedroom. But the Old Lady takes things all in stride, and settles their hash with a threatened dose of castor oil. Of course, the bottle label is fake, and the old woman proves that raising children is very easy, as long as you chill out at the end of the day guzzling down the sweet cider she really keeps stored in the bottle for herself!
Then there’s UPA’s “Meet Mother Magoo”, our first meeting with Quincy’s Mom, in which we not only learn that Mama still has some fire in her spirit, even if her hair denotes snow on the roof, but witness her endless maternal patience in dealing with a son who she knows is a hopeless idiot, but is too supportive of to let him know. Magoo’s efforts to spoil her with a turkey dinner on her birthday (the fourth time this year), consisting of a plucked feather duster wrapped in a laundered red sweater, are patiently tolerated by Mom as long as humanly possible, until the “drumstick” is served to her, at which point she takes matters into her own hands, and knows how to deal withe her offspring without hurting his feelings. Sprinkling the pepper shaker upon his nose, Mom gets Quincy to sneeze, then insists that he’s sick and must go upstairs to bed, to be dosed with all of Mom’s old-fashioned home-made cure-alls, such as turpentine and honey, pine-tar and pumpkin seed. She knows this will send Quincy desperately escaping via bedsheets tied together the climb out the window – and takes the time to plant a kiss on the back of his head as he passes the lower-floor window on his way down.
Perhaps an honorable mention belongs to Heckle and Jeckle’s “Happy Landing”, where Heckle (in the uncut theatrical-length version, rather than the haphazardly-truncated television edit) engages in a yank-at-the-heartstrings oration of sentiment as to all the wonderful things that only a mother can do – even breaking into a verbal impression of Al Jolson paying tribute to his “Mammy” – even if it is all a calculated sales pitch for the magpies’ line of novelty ties which light up in neon when tugged, displaying the word, “Mother”.
Apart from animation, I can’t resist remembering Terry-Thomas’s shining moment in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, where he comments upon his Britisher’s viewpoint of what he refers to as the American “matriarchy”, where they make “every second Tuesday into some sort of Mother’s Day!” Perhaps we don’t really go so far, and I hope the mothers of the nation will forgive that we only single out their celebration for one day a year. Hey, Dads do no better.
I was mulling over suggesting “The Kids in the Shoe” for a further installment of this series; I’m glad to see someone beat me to the punch. With restored copies of “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” and “Somewhere in Dreamland” in circulation, “The Kids in the Shoe” is the Color Classic I most want to see in a high-quality print. The Fleischers and their artists manage to give a sincere and amusing tribute to resourceful motherhood in the midst of all the gags and (particularly in the musical climax) chaos of the cartoon. Definitely one of the highlights of the Color Classics series.
Perhaps worthy of consideration is a Frank Tashlin one-shot, “Booby Hatched”, in which a mother duck, after hatching her clutch of eggs on a frigid December 31st, overlooks one that hasn’t quite finished hatching, and has to rescue him from a wolf. Sara Berner is terrific as the distraught mother (“Robespierre!”), with Mel Blanc providing capable support as Robespierre and a bear that has a pair of classic deadpan lines from writer Warren Foster. Perhaps not a top-tier Looney Tune or an iconic depiction of motherhood, but nevertheless one that’s stuck with me for decades.