Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: Mighty Mouse

 

Oh, Mighty Mouse. What is there to say about Mighty Mouse?

There are a couple of problems with talking about Mighty Mouse. One is that in some ways it's more interesting to talk about the unusual reality of Paul Terry and his Terrytoons Studio where Mighty Mouse was born than it is to talk about the actual character.

Paul Terry was a cartoonist and animator. Terry's animation career started with a film he created while working for the New York Press newspaper, titled Little Herman. After that, he started working at the pioneering Bray Studios. After that, he formed his own company, Terry Productions. Terry then closed that studio to go fight in World War I. After returning, he made a deal with screenwriter Howard Estabrook to make a series of animated films based on Aesop's Fables (these cartoons ended up straying from the fables quite a bit. However, they did provide inspiration for a certain fellow by the name of Walt Disney). After that he formed a partnership with Amedee J. Van Beuren to form Fables Studios. That lasted until 1929 when a disagreement about whether they should make cartoons with sound caused Terry to leave and form Terrytoons Studio. Fables Studio would then change to the lesser-known Van Beuren Studio. For the record, Terry was anti-sound.

None of this was unusual for those chaotic early days of animation. What was unusual was Paul Terry's personality among all this.

Paul Terry didn't value taking risks. He didn't value artistic ambition and pushing the artform forward like Walt Disney. He didn't value being good to his talent like Walter Lantz. He didn't value technical innovation like Max Fleischer or Ub Iwerks. What he did value was pure nose-to-the-grindstone production. Pumping out cartoons faster and cheaper than anyone else. Terry's studio was among the last to add sound to their cartoons and one of the last to produce cartoons in color. He routinely took other people's ideas and claimed them as his own. You'd think he was just in animation for the money, but if you asked him he'd claim there was no money to be made in cartoons. He pushed his animators to make cartoons so quickly that he was pretty much immune to labor organizers, having created enough of a backlog of unreleased cartoons that his studio could coast for months through any work stoppage. In his autobiography My Life in 'Toons, Joseph Barbera talks about working at Terrytoons Studio for a short time. He describes Paul Terry as reminding him of Sydney Greenstreet, an actor best known for playing unsavory characters. He even says that Terry once described animation as being no different than being a milkman with their job being to have their product sitting on their customers' doorstep every morning. There are a couple other things he says, even stuff involving veiled threats. When Barbera was considering leaving, Terry told him that he was “Taking care of him”.

It's safe to say that Paul Terry didn't create Mighty Mouse.

Mighty Mouse as he orignally appeared.

The root of the idea came from animator Isadore Klein in 1942 who suggested creating a parody of Superman. The original idea was to be a superhero fly. Terry nixed the idea then told his animators he had a brilliant idea: a parody of Superman that was a mouse (Terrytoons used a lot of mouse characters).

The character originally started as Super Mouse and he debuted in a cartoon titled The Mouse of Tomorrow. He was an ordinary mouse who, in order to fight off a group of cats plaguing the mouse population, goes into a supermarket and transforms by eating Super Soup, Super Celery and Super Cheese and bathing with Super Soap.

Mighty Mouse in his classic form

At least, that's the first origin story.

Super Mouse's name would be changed to Mighty Mouse in 1944 when Paul Terry learned that another character named Super Mouse would be published in an issue of Coo-Coo Comics from publisher Standard Comics. His costume would start to change that same year too. The final design for Mighty Mouse's costume would debut in the cartoon The Sultan's Birthday on October 13, 1944. Here he'd sport his yellow suit, red cape and red trunks as designed by animator Connie Rasinski.

The thing about Mighty Mouse is that there really isn't a lot to him.

A great number of his early cartoons spend the first two thirds setting up some kind of threat to put normal mice in peril (disasters, monsters, cats. Usually cats). Then in the last third, someone would call for help and Mighty Mouse would zoom down from his home up in the stars to fight the foes and reverse the disaster.

It's like a superhero parody in its simplest form. It doesn't even bother with tropes like secret identities and the like.

In a 1969 interview, Paul Terry attributed the popularity of Mighty Mouse to certain religious qualities:

"When a man is sick, or down, or hurt, you say, 'There's nothing more we can do. It's in God's hand.' And he either survives or he doesn't according to God's plan. Right? So, 'Man's extremity is God's opportunity.' So, taking that as a basis, I'd only have to get the mice in a tough spot and then say, 'Isn't there someone who can help?' 'Yes, there is someone; it's Mighty Mouse!' So, down from the heavens he'd come sailing down and lick the evil spirit, or whatever it was. And everything would be serene again."

After years in both cartoon and comic book fan circles, I'm hesitant to attribute Messiahnic qualities to Superman-like figures. But maybe Terry is right.

Though, it's not to say that there wasn't anything interesting in any of Mighty Mouse's cartoons. The melodrama parodies are notable. Starting in 1945, with Mighty Mouse and the Pirates, Mighty Mouse started starring in a series of cartoons with dialogue sung throughout in the style of an operetta. In these cartoons, there was an element of romantic melodrama because Mighty Mouse would have to rescue a dark-haired beauty of a mouse. By 1947's A Fight to the Finish, they had refined the melodrama spoofs further, replacing the dark-haired mouse girl with a fair-haired one named Pearl Pureheart and giving Mighty Mouse a recurring foe in the form of a villainous cat named Oil Can Harry. None of this was particularly new, though. The format and even the villain were lifted from an old Terrytoons series starring a character named Fanny Zilch. In those, a human version of Oil Can Harry always tries to do nefarious things to the aforementioned Fanny. They're fun, if not entirely original.

Now, the thing about Mighty Mouse is that he may have been the most popular of the Terrytoons characters, but the Terrytoons were not all that popular to begin with. So, why didn't Mighty Mouse fade into obscurity a whole lot faster than he did?

Well, it so happened that at one point in the 1950s, when much of the movie and animation induustries were pondering what effect television was going to have on their livelihoods, Paul Terry just up and sold his entire studio to CBS. It happened seemingly without much warning at all. The great irony is that Terry could have made a lot more for his studio. Terry's business manager who became the Terrytoons excutive producer at CBS said that they recouped the investment the network made in only two years.

Anyway, the rest is television history. The show Mighty Mouse Playhouse hit CBS airwaves in 1955 and became one of the very first Saturday morning hits. Even the famous Mighty Mouse theme song that so many people know came from this show.

There were some interesting twists and turns for the Terrytoons studio as time went on. At one point, Gene Dietch from UPA became the director of Terrytoons. Which meant that someone from one of the most experimental studios of the era was running what was once one of the most risk-averse studios of the era. It didn't really work out though, largely because Dietch's cartoons at Terrytoons really just . . . well . . . weren't funny. There were bright spots, though. Under Gene Dietch, Terrytoons created the character of Tom Terrific for The Captain Kangaroo Show. Then Bill Weiss took over. Under him, characters like Hector Heathcote, Hashimoto and Deputy Dawg were created. But Weiss's tenure was marked by significant cost-cutting. Famed animation maverick Ralph Bakshi also started his career at Terrytoons during this time before moving on to other things. Eventually, the studio closed in 1973.

But Terrytoons' legacy seems to be Mighty Mouse.

In 1979, a new show The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle premiered. It was made by Filmation. In addition to the two previously mentioned cartoons, it also included a segment featuring a vampire duck named Quacula. The show ended in 1980.

The 1979 version of Mighty Mouse

In 1988, the aforementioned Ralph Bakshi returned to the Terrytoons stable of characters with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. Bakshi's take was much more satirical with more risque humor. It also is a much more effective supehero parody, giving Mighty Mouse a secret identity in the form of Mike Mouse and a sidekick by the name of Scrappy Mouse. It lasted two seasons.

Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.

Mighty Mouse and the other Terrytoons characters still belong to CBS, which makes it part of the greater Nickelodeon/Paramount/Viacom family. Right now, Mighty Mouse cartoons are airing on the channel MeTV Toons. There was some talk about a Mighty Mouse movie a while back, but nothing materialized. It's still possible. If nothing else, there's still room to take risks with the Mighty Mouse character. So, maybe don't count the Mouse of Tomorrow out just yet.