Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Merrie Melodies)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
A colony of brown mice is enjoying water sports in a kitchen sink to "Ain't We Got Fun" when a cat gets into the house. He finds a dim grey mouse, promises him all the cheese he wants, and sends him to persuade the others that the cat has come to save them. The brown mice appease: they wait on the cat, fan him, feed him and polish his claws, until he announces that what he wants now is a nice fat mouse. The mice flee, the grey mouse with them, and in a parody of Churchill the colony resolves to fight. They build a mechanical bulldog, arm themselves to "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again", attack the cat, shave him bald, and the grey traitor is left bringing up the rear, muttering that it was all a mistake. The cat, shorn and in a barrel, flees.
Why It Matters
- It is the cleanest cartoon allegory of appeasement the war produced, with the cat as the Axis, the grey mouse as the fifth columnist and the brown mice's pampering of their enemy as Munich; Freleng's staging of the mice's war council and their mechanical dog is brisk and the songs carry the argument. The title phrase was common wartime slang for a traitor within.
- The film is in the public domain through non-renewal and so has been among the most-seen Warner propaganda cartoons. It belongs to the spring of 1943, when the studio released a run of such films, To Duck or Not to Duck on the same day, Tokio Jokio and the Snafu shorts in the months that followed.
Notes and Trivia
- "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again" was a 1941 Charles Tobias and Cliff Friend song written after Pearl Harbor.
- The Churchill parody uses his "we shall fight" cadences.
- See also: The Ducktators (1942), Tokio Jokio (1943), To Duck or Not to Duck (1943).
