Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
The mice are at war with an army of cats led by Peg-Leg Pete. Mickey enlists and is put through a physical examination by a mouse doctor who manhandles him, bounces him, listens to his chest with a stethoscope that goes through him, and generally treats him as a piece of equipment, a scene that has often been cut from later prints as too rough. Passed fit, Mickey is handed a machine gun and sent to the trenches. His fighting is comic and effective: he blasts away at the advancing cats, dodges their fire, and when they come on in a column he stands at the trench and bops each one on the head with a mallet as it passes, until the whole enemy army lies in a heap. His comrades hoist him on their shoulders as a hero.
Why It Matters
- It is the first film to put Mickey in uniform and into combat, a tradition that ran through to the war years, and the trench setting, eleven years after the Armistice, treats the Great War as material for slapstick in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years later; the physical examination is the most remembered scene for the discomfort it causes.
- Published in 1929, it is now out of copyright in the United States. The mouse officer who shouts "Company, forward march!" is the first mammal in a Mickey Mouse cartoon to speak a full sentence; the series had so far managed only single syllables, laughs and Minnie's "Yoo-hoo".
Notes and Trivia
- Disney had sent Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to war in Great Guns! in 1927, and Julius the Cat in Alice's Little Parade in 1926.
- The film was banned in Germany in 1930 because the cats' helmets looked German.
- See also: When the Cat's Away (1929), The Plowboy (1929).