226. The Mice Will Play (1938)

Release Date: December 31st, 1938

Series: Merrie Melodies

Director: Tex Avery

Story: Jack Miller

Animation: Sid Sutherland

Musical Direction: Carl Stalling

Starring: Berneice Hansell (Susie, Mice), Margaret Hill-Talbot (Johnny), Mel Blanc (Cat, Johnny), The Four Playboys (Chorus)

Whereas the first cartoon of 1938 was a Tex Avery short, released January 1st, the final cartoon of 1938 is another Tex Avery short, released December 31st. Avery bookends the year by turning back the clock and dabbling in formulas well acquainted with audiences.

A standard but enjoyable fare, The Mice Will Play follows in the footsteps of predecessors such as Ain't We Got Fun or A Sunbonnet Blue. Here, the mice play in a laboratory, experimenting with microscopes, test tubes, and eye tests. However, Susie Mouse is kidnapped in the other room, a future test subject for the doctor's experiments, and a hungry cat may thwart Johnny Mouse's plans to save her.

Like A Sunbonnet Blue (and most cartoons synonymous with this one), the opening is a moody establishment shot of a building's façade. While the signage indicating one Dr. I.M. Nutts is a common Averyism more novel in 1938 than it is today, the camera is quick to truck in and cross dissolve, lingering not on punny deliveries. 

Instead, the lingering is centered on the interior of the laboratory, introduced through a slow, horizontal pan, test tubes obscuring the foreground. Following the same formula established by Blue, Avery's vast improvement as a director is easily noticeable through comparing the staging in Blue and Mice. Avery experiments with lighting more in Mice, with hues more vibrant and eye-catching. The pan is also much shorter than the former, providing adequate atmosphere without becoming monotonous. A truck-in and dissolve parallel to the one in Blue is also slightly less jittery and abrasive. Even when copying himself straight out of the book, Avery's improvement is noticeable.

Such is the case with the entrance of the mice. Rather than allowing a lone mouse or three to peek their heads out of a mousehole, Avery instead focuses on a knot in the wall. Said knot functions as a door, complete with a door hinge and creaky sound effects to maintain the Avery policy of "antiquated meets modern".

Audiences have come to associate the pie-eyed, bulbous cheeked rodent designs with the squeaky vocals of one Berneice Hansell, which is asserted here as well. Hansell's vocal roles have been dwindling throughout 1938, her squeaky voice typically reserved purely for comedic purposes. It's somewhat of an oddity to see her cast straight-laced again, voicing all of the mice. Then again, Avery does manage to squeeze in purposefully nerve grating squeaks later on.

In any case, cute, cuddly mice completely contradict their warm appearance with modern '30s colloquialisms: "Gee, this is a funny lookin' joint!"

Repeating the same line shrieked by Daffy in Daffy Duck in Hollywood, the general crowd consensus is a hushed "You're correct! Absolutely correct!" 

With that, the mice make a cautious exit out of the mouse hole. An attempt to be artsy through shadows falls slightly flat due to how lightly exposed they are on the wood, appearing washed out and battling with the darker hues of the door.

Avery remedies such in the next scene. All mirroring one another, the mice furtively creep through the lab, Carl Stalling's music score reflectively atmospheric with string plucked footsteps.

Seeing as the cartoon has largely been unassuming, peppered with only a few Averyisms, Avery grounds the audience back into the world of Warner cartoons in a wonderfully creative bit of pantomime. The lead mouse, Johnny, cautiously leads the gang, heading under a pipe.

PLUNK! His shadow on the wall, exaggerated by the lighting, hits the protruding pipe and falls to the ground. Irv Spence's signature trail lines are even seen in the shadows as it collapses. To add insult to injury (and remind us that the shadow hitting the pipe was indeed real), Johnny furiously shushes his shadow as a result of the noise.

While Spence's animation has relatively been restrained in the character designs thus far, his animation trademarks rise to the surface in the next explosion of a gag. Once more following in the footsteps of A Sunbonnet Blue, the mice, after a quiet, pregnant pause, all shout: "HEY! ANYBODY HERE!?"

And, as was the case in Blue, the mice make a break for it. Different from Blue is the execution of the exit; in the former, the mouse zipped straight back into his mouse hole in a quick, rolling pan. Here, the shot is cut up, first showing the dust cloud and then showing the mice gnawing their way back into the wall, adding to the sense of urgency. Avery slips a pop culture reference by having the mice chew "Gone With The Wind" into the wall; Bob Clampett would repurpose the animation for his own Scalp Trouble a few months later.

Perhaps the greatest part of the gag is the mice sheepishly poking their heads back out, with three times as many mice all managing to fit through the chewed typography. A scene like that takes a lot of coordination and planning, keeping track of which mouse goes through where and how to make their entrances--especially at such a diminutive size--readable and clear.

Johnny scans his horizons while illuminated by some atmospheric lighting. 

"There's nobody here!" Stalling's music score is significantly more hopeful and naïve as squeaky voiced Johnny announces "C'mon, let's have some fun!"

And fun they will have. All of the mice scramble over each other to make an exit (some of the action lost/cluttered by the camera movement.) With their setting thoroughly established, the environmental gags du jour are centered around laboratory equipment.

Here, Johnny and the gang discover a microscope and some bacteria slides, eagerly scaling some beakers to get a good luck. Since we already see that the slide has three samples, the next sequence of bacteria related gags comes in threes.

First, red and white corpuscles squaring off. Avery gets artsy by having the camera focus, mimicking the microscope getting into focus. Here, the red and white blood cells are depicted as opponents in a football match. Marked with a cheery, sporty music score, a red blood cell manages to get the ball and dashes into the end zone, backflipping and celebrating his win. Again, while funnier then than now, the speed at which Avery executes and moves onto the next gag is appreciated; he doesn't linger on jokes to farm laughs. He trusts the audience.

The next two gags are standard but once novel. Whereas the chicken pox germs is depicted as a bunch of baby chicks clucking and pecking at the slide (with "Chicken Reel" accompanying the action), the whooping cough germs have a bunch of dog faced germs wheezing uncontrollably. One does wonder how Avery would have executed the same gag a few years later. Undoubtedly, it would have been paced twice as fast.

While the mice giggle and roll over themselves in their bout of amusement, Avery continues to harken back to the cartoons of yesteryear by having a hungry cat spying through a skylight (in fact, It's Got Me Again! also had a very similarly designed cat peering at an overhead shot of mice through a skylight, and that was in 1932.) While the cat's design looks straight out of Friz Freleng's The Lyin' Mouse, Irv Spence's snappy, loose animation brings it back to the modern late-1938 day.

Segue to the next piece of action. Spilling out of Dr. Nutts' bag is a stethoscope, investigated thoroughly by the mice. After a few blinks accentuated by Stalling's music score, Johnny picks up the earpieces while his partner and crime runs off with the bottom. 

Somewhat similar to Frank Tashlin's "surprise" pans seen in Little Pancho Vanilla and You're an Education, the camera pans briefly to the mouse and revealing a third partner in crime; a literal lab rat. The mouse in overalls places the stethoscope over his buddy's heart, which thuds in a loud, cartoonish timpani drum rhythm. To stress the beat of the heart, his heart leaps out of his chest AND causes the ear pieces to throb against Johnny's ears at the same time. 

So, to further send the gag, Avery has another mouse drop a heart pill into the test subject's mouth. Slowly, the elastic rhythm of his heartbeat picks up.

In a matter of seconds, the heartbeat is turned onto an entire percussive drum solo, with Johnny helplessly writhing and flopping about as the drumming beats into his ears. The quick, rhythmic interludes of a woodblock add an extra bit of whimsicality to the gag, purposefully disillusioning the audience from the heartbeat and trying to sell it as a drum solo. The absence of a music score touches upon this as well.

Soon enough, Johnny is sent flopping to the floor, staring dubiously at the camera. Interestingly, a few  production drawings for this sequence reveal an alternative, with Johnny appearing sick. One wonders why it was changed; this is pure speculation and nothing more, but I wonder if the original scene was perhaps seen as too gruesome. Perhaps the heart pill gag didn't translate into a drum beat as well and just seemed morbid, especially with Johnny's own nauseous/dizzy reactions? Perhaps it was another The Daffy Doc situation, where Bob Clampett complained about the iron lung being too gruesome and not whimsical enough. This scene here is certainly full of whimsy--maybe it wasn't that way before. Who's to say.

Another throwback to bygone tropes, which Avery himself has participated in, is the damsel in distress. Avery makes a point to assert the parallels between the shift in mood. The giggles of the mice and jaunty, floaty music score soon drown out in favor of a more somber, apprehensive score, broken by the sound of a girl crying for help. Even the lighting gradually gets darker, the vibrant hues of the test tubes and lab equipment lost. Getting even more artsy with the pan, a door separating two rooms is animated in perspective as it passes the foreground. The only caveat occurs when the camera halts the pan and zooms in, but the door continues to align itself as if the pan were still going. It's only for a few frames at best, creating a slight gliding sensation. 

Our priority is not doors in perspective, but kidnapped mice. Another mouse voiced by Hansell, pink dress, mary-janes, and eyelashes quickly indicating that her gender will be key for future romantic endeavors in the short. The sign on the cage fills in any missing gaps, whether it be pinning her as unlucky experimental rodent 13, or noting that the procedure is to take place the next morning. Her sobs and cries for help also aid in stressing her predicament.

Unfortunately, her cries for help are futile, drowned out instead by the happy giggles of the mice playing on the lab equipment. The action is nicely divided and the scene clearly composed, with mice frolicking in the foreground, background, and center of the screen, their poses and actions full of clarity.

The next center of our attention is an X-Ray, ready to be abused by two mice. As mentioned previously, Avery's composition and theatrical filmmaking is relatively unsung. While his art skills weren't the most elaborate, he certainly had an eye for intriguing visuals and knew how to make his composition pop--essential when desecrating the atmosphere for a gag seconds later. The lab equipment in the foreground serves as a nice frame for the action, accentuating the negative space between that and the X-Ray. And, as is the case with all of the backgrounds in this short, the colors are lush and vibrant while remaining relatively unassuming. They appeal, but they don't distract.

In any case, the inevitable occurs as the X-Ray is flipped on and scans one of the mice. Avery cheats the X-Ray scan by having the scan be shot at profile, whereas in the cut before, the mouse was staring straight ahead. Notice on the wide shot of the two mice, the paint streaks on the mouse to the left are quite visible, particularly on his head. 

Enter the villain, who has made his way into the lab. Though it somewhat difficult to see in Spence's previous scene, the cat's villainous mustache is on full display, a great facetious jab at the cat's antagonism and the regressive nature of the cartoon as a whole. Avery seems quite aware that he's dipping his toes into tropes well established throughout the decade.

On the topic of modern and antiquated, Spence's loose, elastic animation streamlines the cartoon and slightly brings it back to the present day in a great scene of Johnny drinking neon fluid. The acknowledgment of the liquid is nice, with elastic, rubbery head movements from Johnny, doublechecking the label. His bow-legged stance as he happily slurps on the liquid (positioned safely next to a bottle of poison) is pure Spence.

Though the payoff is very easy to guess, it, like many aspects of Avery's cartoons, are difficult to rule against with the pure jauntiness its established with. Marching along, Johnny flashes in neon, rhythmic blinks along to the backing track of "Garden of the Moon". The neon is nice and clear, contouring only his silhouette and facial details. Having the neon cover every line, every wrinkle on his clothing, every finger on his glove, would quickly clutter the action and make it seem messy. Simple is best.

Elsewhere, another mouse stumbles upon the vision test department, eye blink "plink plink"s still scored to "Garden of the Moon". Here, the mouse picks up a pair of oversized glasses and tries them on for size.

Instead of cutting away to the vision chart, Avery eases the momentum (having already just cut) by panning to the vision chart instead. Here, the letters on the chart are mostly acronyms: IOU is self explanatory, Federal Housing Agency, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps, each popular acronyms and talking points in 1938.

The Federal Housing Administration was spawned from FDR's New Deal, insuring mortgage for those with lower incomes. The Works Progress Administration allowed for a boom in large scale public works projects, whether through building schools and hospitals, planting trees, laying sewer lines, or repaving roads. The act was dissolved in 1943 when weapons production for the war was high and low unemployment rates, with the government finding no need for a national relief program. And, finally, the Civilian Conservation Corps supplied unemployed, unmarried men with manual labor jobs, pertaining particular to natural resources in rural areas. 

Carl Stalling scores the mouse's cross-eyed vision to an appropriate tune of "I've Been Working on the Railroad", honing in on the focus of New Deal policies and labor.

With that, one topical reference fades to another through some interesting lens manipulation, the image blurring out of focus and waving. The vision chart now advertises the promise of the Ham and Eggs Movement, a con led by pro-Nazi radio personality Robert Noble and Willis Allen, advocating that elderly, unemployed Californian residents would receive a weekly pension of $30. The movement unsurprisingly favored its creators rather than its beneficiaries. 

With pro-Nazi radio commentators and con-acts on the mind, the mouse is quick to flee the scene.

The damsel in distress reminds us of her predicament through tongue-in-cheek calls for help: "HELP! HELP! AND HELP ANOTHER TIME!"

Avery's next bit is one of the highlights of the cartoon, as it's pure Avery following his own formula. Having seen a number of variations on this very gag in a short span, he still manages to make it entertaining every time.

Here, a group of mice gang up on Johnny with a needle, who's preoccupied with a microscope. Cutting to a close-up, the camera movement slowly zooms in and out with the mice's drawn out cadence of "Oooooone... twoooo..."

And, just as they're about to hit the ever fated three, the silhouette of an audience member jolts up in front of the screen, screaming "DON'T DO THAAAAAAAAAAT!"

Rather than having the mice sulk away, embarrassed of their sadistic endeavors, Avery continues to toss the cutesy conventions aside by making the mice complain and argumentative.

"Awwww, we NEVER have any fun!"

Juggling three separate plots at one, a shot of the mustachioed cat putting on a bib, knife and fork in hand, remind us of his own quest for dinner. 

Cutting rapidly from one storyline to another, we now segue to the damsel in distress writing a note in the cage, reading her cry for help out loud. A close up reveals that even Susie isn't victimless from the crime of slapping fingernails on animals (i.e. most close-up paintings involving Porky's hands from the '30s)--her manicure a reminder that she is a vulnerable female in need of saving.

She folds the note into a paper airplane in comparatively intricate (yet simplified for time and clarity) animation, which she sends flying through the opening of the door. Cartoon law prevails in that all paper airplanes must make a loop-de-loop while in flight.

As fate would have it, the airplane reaches Johnny. Rather than poking him in the head or the butt, Averyisms pursue as the airplane instead squeals to a halt in mid-air and magically unfolds itself. Even in cartoons such as these which are by-the-book crowd pleasers and not much more, Avery still makes a promise to squeak his own comic tendencies in to alleviate any monotony. 

The next shot has the paper much bigger than Johnny's head as a way to clearly stage the lettering. Johnny reads the message out loud before turning his head to the audience.

"Gee! She must be in trouble!" Hansell's delivery almost sounds deliberately stilted and fed as Johnny states the obvious, another tongue-in-cheek commentary on the cartoon's genre. 

With that, another Averyism is fulfilled as a hidden message pops straight onto the paper with no introduction: "P.S. You said it, Big Boy!"

In a clever bit of staging, Johnny scrambles to the rescue, zipping diagonally from the foreground to the background, the camera following his movements as he gnaws a hole through the door. 

A beaker propped against the table where Susie is perched on serves as an adequate ladder for Johnny, who scales the spiral in no time.

Avery-esque problems require Avery-esque solutions as Johnny opens the door to the cage with ease, pulling vertically on the bars and allowing them to fold up like a curtain. No snide asides or long pauses regarding the convenience of the escape are necessary--the action speaks for itself.

Johnny agrees; just as Susie coddles him and calls him his hero, he retorts "Lay off the love stuff, lady! Let's get outta here!"

And, despite shoving her to the ground, he establishes that there are no hard feelings by grabbing her hand and leading her out of the execution chamber.

After they pass through the hole chewed in the door, a pause is felt as the camera stays on the hole. The brake squealing sound effects in the background fill in the context clues, and soon Johnny rushes back into the scene with a cork to stuff the exit closed.

Elsewhere, Irv Spence provides more animation of the villainous cat, creeping along the laboratory in silence (save for the violin plucks accompanying his footsteps.) Spence's design sense is increasingly noticeable, particularly in the giant, stubbly chin on the cat and his limber, elastic construction. The shadow reflected on the wall elevates the suspended ambience of the scene.

Most of the cuts in this cartoon are jump cuts, some immediately after the other, which give the filmmaking a bit of energy and illustrate multiple events happening at once. Had the transition been a cross dissolve or fade to black and back in, the momentum would have been slowed considerably and the cat wouldn't seem as much like an impending threat.

In any case, Susie's repeated coos of "Oh, Johnny! Johnny! Johnny! Johnny?" are a prime example of Avery using Hansell's squeaky talents as a way to grate the audience's nerves. If it doesn't grate the audience's nerves, it certainly does Johnny's, who retorts in yet another colloquialism "What's eatin' ya anyway?"

The next bit of romantic business ("Can't you see I loooove you?") contains sardonic undertones as Susie uses the X-Ray to show her love for Johnny, a lacy valentine heart in pumping in her chest proving her claims. Avery loved showing the obvious.

Finally, Johnny seems satisfied, allowing the two lovebirds to have a bashful, giggling, lovey-dovey scene all to themselves. 

The next sequence further dates the cartoon in more ways than one: a musical number. It's certainly been quite awhile since Avery has played a musical number totally straight, and harkens back to a time where they were mandated crowd pleasers, rather than attempting to bend the song to the humor of the cartoons. A Feud There Was and Cinderella Meets Fella both had song numbers, but they both felt facetious, whether it be the singing hillbillies sleeping through their own song or Elmer's Joe Pennerisms interrupting the music. Here, mirroring Ain't We Got Fun and A Sunbonnet Blue (particularly the former), Avery travels back in time.

Another aspect of the dated musical number comes from the music stylings, which is bound to happen in any cartoon with any musical number. The song has a swinging '30s influence because it was the swinging '30s and that's what was popular. 

A spirited, swing rendition of "Here Comes the Bride", the song number is still quite harmless. Catchy vo-dee-oh harmonizing from The Sportsmen Quartet paired with swinging big band music stylings and colorful, synchronous composition make for a good pair. A shot of the brass section mirrored against a vibrant test tube backdrop is particularly impressive.

While a trio of swinging, harmonizing mice singing and narrating the action beckons comparisons to Ain't We Got Fun, Avery's strengths as a director are once more apparent by juxtaposing the two. The pacing in Mice is much faster, the staging more theatrical, all with a bit more bite than Fun, which could be conflated with a Friz Freleng cartoon if one has only seen the song number. Both are incredibly catchy song numbers, but the growth is apparent.

In any case, Mice follows Sunbonnet by having the two starring mice get married. Here, Johnny and Susie profess their vows through means of jaunty clarinet solos. The climax of the song is certainly a highlight, with theatrical zooms and cuts between the singing mice, the band, Johnny and Susie, and the approaching hungry cat. Our number closes on a slightly provocative shot of the singing mice thrusting their pelvises into the curtain of their mousehole. All in a day's work.

As the ending few shots of the song revealed, the hungry cat is within distance of the happy couple. Avery puts Hansell's giggles to work as Susie reminds Johnny "Now we're married... an' by an' by..."

The cat arrives just in time for Susie to claim "Maybe there'll be lots an' lots an' LOTS of little fat mice!"

Johnny nods, his mind already abuzz with getting to work on that department. Whereas the big reveal of A Sunbonnet Blue had a baby bonnet (and implication of having babies) be the big reveal, with the husband shrieking at the audience, here the news of pregnancy is received in stride--for it's not Johnny who gets the last laugh, but the cat.

"Lotsa little fat mice?" The cat's voice is a more pleasant, soft-spoken timbre from Mel Blanc as opposed to a gravelly growl. 

"Hmmmmm!"

Avery's design sense is strong in the final scene, a nub on the cat's head similar to the one on Daffy in Daffy Duck in Hollywood. "I t'ink I'll wait!"

While seemingly another formulaic cat and mouse cartoon and not much else (which does apply in some respect), Avery continues to twist a few conventions here and there to make the cartoon remain pleasant and have a bit of bite. Perhaps most admirable is totally squandering the entire motive of the cat in the matter of a few seconds. Throughout the cartoon, the cat stalks and stalks and stalks and stalks the mice, preparing the audience for a frenzied chase scene or sardonic joke with Johnny and Susie's tails dangling from its lips. That never happens. Instead, Avery is happy to rid the cat of his motives for the sake of a punchline, because that in itself is funny--and he was right. While it may not be the most overzealous example of his anarchic filmmaking, it certainly is anarchic in its own way.

Mice, in spite of its retrograde structure, does seem to be very self aware. Whether it's Johnny's tough talkin' '30s slang, juxtaposing with his cute and cuddly appearance, the incredibly obvious mustache on the cat to indicate he's the villain, or Susie's cries of "HELP! HELP! HELP ANOTHER TIME!", Avery is aware that he's stepping back in time and dabbling in old formulas, and straightforwardly at that. 

As a result, Mice is certainly routine and not one of Avery's most rousing entries, but remains amusing and spirited enough to get a pass. No matter how you cut it, Avery has improved vastly from the days of Ain't We Got Fun and A Sunbonnet Blue, and even when mimicking those formulas, his more streamlined filmmaking and gag sense still manages to keep the cartoon up to date.

With that being the last entry of 1938, thus comes another yearly retrospective. The 1937-1938 season, as mentioned before, was an incredibly bountiful season full of fresh changes, new energy, and an era dominated by the directors all getting their footing. Warner Bros cartoons are on the map. While it would take until the early-mid '40s for the Warner style to truly solidify, it was by this time very noticeable. A reputation has been made, and an earned one at that.

With all of these new arrivals (directors, voice actors, storymen, and characters), an era of constant, fresh change is hard to keep consistent for long. As such, the 1938-1939 season does show some decline, with the 1939 year as a whole one of the weakest years of the studio for quite awhile--Tex Avery dabbled mostly in spot gag travelogues, which lacked the anarchic bite of his previous innovations, Bob Clampett grows fatigued with Porky, who begins to turn into a smiling stock character and little else, Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton continue to create mediocrities, and Chuck Jones' cartoons--while visually appealing--drag compared to the more energetic pace of his colleagues. To keep up the evergreen pace felt through 1938 and 1937 would be unrealistic in the first place, but it is disappointing to see the cartoons stagnate.

In any case, 1939 still has plenty of amusing entries. Shorts such as Thugs with Dirty Mugs and Dangerous Dan McFoo are some of Avery's brightest in his Warner tenure, Clampett continues to make a number of spirited Porky cartoons such as Polar Pals, Porky's Picnic and Wise Quacks, and Chuck Jones debuts his first starring character of Sniffles. A slow Chuck Jones cartoon or milquetoast Porky Pig short is leagues above of the days dominated by Buddy or Beans. 

As such, a new year dawns upon us, and with each cartoon comes a brighter future.

Enjoy! The cartoon is also available on HBO Max.