It’s a Mighty Mouse sort of day here- so prepare yourself for that clanging and water bucket sound effects!
But first, some quick Thunderbean news:
There have been busy weeks here as we try to get through dubbing special sets, working on cleaning all sorts of things up and muddling through agreement language, for months now. It’s been a dizzying time for me here – and appears to be moving in a really excellent direction in the end. I’m going to be relying on both my long-time small team to help guide the coming weeks as we move into a new period in this little company. These new opportunities will allow so many other things to move forward much quicker, and we’ll be announcing those things soon.
And now — onto a Mighty Mouse!
Growing up, I could never differentiate one Mighty Mouse cartoon from another, except for The Mouse of Tomorrow, the first of the series. Watching these later in my life, I can see why. The cause scenes in many of them (from the early 40s into the 50s) are pretty close in design and execution to each other — really not much different. I’ve started to really enjoy moments in these cartoons over the whole films on some. This is one of those for me.
Mighty Mouse and the Kilkenny Cats (1945) has the simplest of plot setups, as many of the Mighty Mouse shorts do: The Kilkenny Cat range is terrorizing the mice community. The mice organize and fight. Mighty Mouse comes in and saves the day. That’s it!
Now, if you’re here for the animation and backgrounds on this one it’s pretty fun. I really do like the scenes where the mice are organizing and preparing for battle in the toyshop, and a lot of the fun animation of the battles throughout. It’s fun to see Terrytoon’s backgrounds of New York, especially from the sky.
This is a scan of the 16mm TV print. I wish they all looked at least this good!
Have a good week everyone!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
The “Gas House District” was a real thing, being centered on East 15th and East 16th Street near Avenue C, hard up against the East River, and spreading for a few blocks in either direction. The district was indeed famous for being Irish, tough, and poor. The enormous manufactured (coal) gas tanks were gradually demolished in the 1930s, with most of the tenements being bulldozed around 1945 to make way for Stuyvesant Town, one of the first great public housing projects in the city. The aerial shot of Manhattan shown at the start of the cartoon incorrectly puts the district more or less on the far West Side of Manhattan, near 33rd Street, as you can tell from the Empire State Building looming in the center at 5th and 33rd. This was the area of Hell’s Kitchen, another extremely tough Irish neighborhood. The story thus more or less conflates two famous neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Not sure about your geography: There’s no bridge across the Hudson in midtown Manhattan. More likely an imaginary NYC with bridges on both midtown shores.
I agree with you regarding the sameness of so many of these Mighty Mouse cartoons, but isn’t it amazing how many variations on the same theme they did come up with for all those years of creating such cartoons! Even the soundtrack music is almost exactly the same, except for a little hints of music that identify the local or identity of the characters.
I was watching one of your “special“ discs by the way and enjoying it! I hope you can get back into production of those very soon. I’m glad that there is progress, because after what you have told us within the last few weeks, I was very worried about the Continuation of your little company. You have come this far! At this point, I almost constantly wish that you were given control of some big group of copyrighted cartoons like this one. All those Paul Terry cartoons definitely need some work. The film print available gets older and older with every year until I’m worried that many of the negatives are gone south.
Good luck and I look forward to the weeks ahead as always.
My favorite bit: the homage to Herriman–mice throwing bricks at cats.
So cheap. So repetitive. So ‘made for TV’. With so few choices on Saturday mornings, I would watch Might Mouse, numbly. The earliest MMs were so much better, and startling how much so over the later ones. Heckyl and Jeckyll were crappy too. Gandy Goose was so much better a Terrytoon product, but I don’t remember seeing them on CBS Saturday mornings in the early 60s.
What a great idea for a future Cartoon Research article:
the Made for Tv cartoons of 1945.
Geesh.
This would have been the perfect cartoon to show before Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York”!
According to legend, the Kilkenny Cats were two denizens of that Irish city who fought each other so savagely that in the end, there was nothing left of them but their disembodied tails. “To fight like the Kilkenny Cats” is to engage in a battle where nobody wins and nothing is gained. That story, however, wouldn’t have made much of a Mighty Mouse cartoon. I can imagine Mighty Mouse smiling at the feline fray with approval and saying “Have at it, me boyos!”
“Mighty Mouse and the Kilkenny Cats” is an easy cartoon for me to overlook, because it lacks any of the singing or cute damsels in distress that make his greatest adventures such a joy to watch. Still, it’s not without its virtues. The background paintings, as you mentioned, are wonderfully evocative of a bygone era, and there’s a lot of fine staging and animation in the battle sequences. The scene with the infantry mice getting bottle cap helmets stamped onto their heads reminds me of the Goofy Gophers cartoon where the same thing happens to one of them — Mack, I think, or possibly Tosh — and the other has to remove it with a bottle opener. “Oh, thank you so much!” “You’re quite welcome!”
There was a wartime Warners cartoon that uses the same gag, with the added frisson of one of the mice nexplicably getting a straw hat. Maybe he’s mean for the USO?
There once were two cats of Kilkenny.
Each thought there was one cat too many.
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
Tlll, except for their nails
And the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there weren’t any!
Some pretty flagrant plagiarism by Terrytoons here; the bottle caps as army helmets gag is lifted directly from “The Fifth Column Mouse” (1943).
I’ve learned that _everybody_ stole from everybody else. Not just cartoons, but comedy short subjects back in their heyday (1920s-30s). Hal Roach’s people stole a lot of stuff from Mack Sennett. And the number of “lifts” from one cartoon to another – both within and between studios – is just incredible. Clearly, I don’t understand copyright law!
You gotta love how Mighty Mouse (particularly in the earlier ones before Oil Can Harry became a mainstay) would usually never show up in his own cartoons until more than halfway through the short, even at the last minute or so at times.
By this logic, that would make the Sourpuss cartoon ‘Comic Book Land’ an actual Mighty Mouse short, considering the latter’s appearance during the chase sequence.
I think “Comic Book Land” is the only cartoon in which Mighty Mouse actually says, “Here I come to save the day,” until the opening theme-song to the TV show a few year later.
Mighty Mouse sings “Here I come to save the day!” in “Crying Wolf” (1947), “The Witch’s Cat” (1948), “A Cold Romance” (1949), “Perils of Pearl Pureheart” (1949), and “Comic Book Land” (1950). He also sings “Here I AM to save the day!” in “Sunny Italy” (1951). There may be other instances that I’ve overlooked.
Glad to see a version of this with the scenes edited by CBS in better quality! I remember Jerry Beck’s DVD Garage Sale having a lower quality but complete version of it alongside a higher quality but censored version of it.
Speaking of Terrytoons, I’d like to ask people here: does the Hector Heathcote short titled “Foxed by a Fox” exist? (https://www.intanibase.com/forum/Posts/t5187–Foxed-by-a-Fox—1961—-supposed-Hector-Heathcote-Terrytoon-short-directed-by-Dave-Tendlar)