These Mice Were Really Stirring.

Well, now that we're into the holiday season, I decided to share my thoughts on a rather ill-conceived Christmas cartoon.

The short was called "Mice Greeting You," by Famous Studios. This was an early Herman and Katnip cartoon. Here's what I thought of it:

Here, Katnip's name is Kitty. Why they decided to give a male cat a female name is beyond me. But that's not the worst of it. In the short's climax, the cat traps the mice inside a turkey. As he prepares to feast on turkey with mice stuffing, he nearly stabs one of the rodents to death! Thank goodness Herman was there to rescue them!

The ending was equally shocking. It showed the mice using Katnip/Kitty as their Christmas tree, and plugging his tail into the wall socket, while singing a song about wishing him a merry Christmas. This song was also used by Herman as a phony singing telegram as a diversion while the mice stole food.

This cartoon essentially showed enemies being cruel and sadistic to each other, so unlike the many made for TV Christmas specials, there was nothing Christmasy about it. There are very few cartoons that I rate zero, but this is one of them. So it's no wonder I'm glad I haven't seen it since the mid '70's.

Verily, especially in comparison with the Tom and Jerry cartoon from MGM: The Night Before Christmas. How's this for an ending? Jerry trips the release mechanism on the mousetrap, and instead of snapping shut in an eyeblink, it plays a music box chorus of Jingle Bells as the crossbar slowly arcs like an indicator gauge. PeterHale is right: Paramount Pictures had no blessed idea of what an animation department can / should do, or what it meant to the overall media. Plus, this is Famous Studios, likely after the rift between Max and Dave Fleischer, and still using a variation of the Popeye versus Bluto model. It's one thing to make a Christmas-themed cartoon; it takes one's A-game to make a good Christmas cartoon.