Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Herman, a sharp city mouse with a Brooklyn voice, visits his country cousins, a houseful of timid mice who live in terror of the cat. Herman is not afraid of cats. He undertakes to teach the cousins how a city mouse deals with one, and the rest of the film is his campaign against the cat of the house, Katnip in all but name: traps set and sprung, the cat lured into the cellar, the mousetrap turned on its owner, a fight in the kitchen in which Herman uses every object to hand and the cat comes off worst. The cousins watch, cheer and learn nothing. Herman leaves them with the cat thoroughly cowed, and the cat with a new respect for mice from the city.
Why It Matters
- The film sets up the Herman and Katnip series, Famous Studios' long-running cat-and-mouse franchise, by pairing Herman, who had appeared alone since 1944, with a dim cat voiced by Sid Raymond; the pairing was formalised in 1950 and ran for nearly a decade, with a violence that made Tom and Jerry look restrained.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it is the easiest way to see Herman before the series proper; Arnold Stang, later the voice of Top Cat, gives Herman his wiseacre delivery.
Notes and Trivia
- Herman's country cousins returned in several of the later series entries.
- Larry Riley, co-writer, was a Famous Studios story regular into the 1950s.
- See also: The Stupidstitious Cat (1947), Cat o' Nine Ails (1948), Top Cat (1961).