Thanksgiving Special: Pantry Panic (1941)

Pantry Panic (1941)
Dir.: Walter Lantz (uncredited)
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Yay! It's November, and not only that, it's Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving, but one thing I am not enjoying is the weather. Here in Southern California, it is going to be above 90 degrees Fahrenheit once again today, as it has been all week long. Let me stress this: I am an Alaskan boy borne and bred, and while I did move to So Cal willingly a dozen years ago, that doesn't mean that I ever have to like the weather here. It's always going to be too hot to me in this place, no matter how much I might acclimate myself.

For the past couple of weeks, the weather toned itself down from the 100-degree heights we were topping in late October (when we had some pretty surprised friends in from out of town). For a good dozen days or so, we had been able to cut down on the electric bill a good deal by being able to turn off the AC in the house, keep all the windows open upstairs and downstairs, and let the house cool and heat itself naturally. The winds have been downright pleasant – just the right amount of velocity matched with coolness – and with the toned down mood of nature has come a more relaxed state of mind and body. At least, you know, speaking for myself.

And now... this week happened. Too hot for the season, too hot for the house or to do anything outside, and just too hot for me. Looking to the skies in recent weeks, flocks of Canadian geese have come whipping through our area, honking loudly in near unison as they pass above my head on their way to potentially warmer climes. No one gave them the memo that this place never cools down much at all, so pass us they do. Me, I would dearly love to join them in their flight, if only I had enough airfare to secure myself a pair of nifty wings like theirs, wherever it is that they end up is where I wish to be right now.

Woody Woodpecker is exactly the sort to stay put when the rest of his neighbors take off seasonally, and that is just what he does in the third official cartoon in his long-running series, Pantry Panic, released originally in 1941. (It is actually the fourth film in which he appeared, as he first showed up in an Andy Panda short called Knock Knock.) The Woody in this cartoon is not exactly the one who is fondly remembered by a couple of generations of Baby Boomers and their offspring. The voice is certainly there, though not yet in its most recognizable form, but his look is a little more haggard, and far from the more streamlined, domesticated version of his most popular self. Woody is drawn here to look almost completely mad from the start, and his behavior is completely ravenous and unhinged, especially when compared against later efforts.

At the beginning of Pantry Panic, we are presented with a scenario roughly approximating my wishes, only the temperature threat is the complete opposite of my situation. In a small town comprised of numerous bird houses built among some trees in a forest, the local weatherman – a Professor Weatherby Groundhog, who proclaims himself via signage as a "Weather Forecaster Extraordinary" – runs out of a door built into the side of a small mound, itself surrounded by forecasting equipment and a large thermometer. The bespectacled groundhog pins his forecast to a weather bulletin board in the center of town, and then proceeds to ring a bell alerting the townsfolk, but each time he reaches up to pull the rope his plump furry body seems to leave his pants behind in midair. The local birds pop their heads out of their houses one by one, and they both run and fly to the town square to read the announcement.

The bulletin reads: "Underground News Service: Terrific cold wave headed this way... All birds advised to go south at once!" One panicked bluebird cries out, "Weatherman's right! We'd better go south right away!" All of the other birds, as one, respond, "You bet!" and then scatter in every direction. One bird couple, to the cry of "Winter's coming! Winter's coming!," closes up their shutters and hang a sign on their house reading "Closed for the Winter." Another bird, who keeps a worm in a small cage, pushes his house inside a hole in a tree trunk and zippers it shut. An entire bird family (with a pet cricket in tow) runs off but leaves an egg behind. The little egg pops legs, arms and head out of its shell, and runs after the rest of his family in great haste.

Woody Woodpecker, always selfish and never heeding the advice of others in his community, is determined to enjoy the day swimming in the local pool. "Boy, oh boy!" he exclaims, "What a day for a swim!" However, he is distracted by the frantic disembarking of his neighbors to parts far south. From atop his diving board, Woody spies dozens of birds and other creatures as they charge past a sign pointing to Miami, with the distance of "1234½" (miles) chiseled into it. What looks like a Civil War vet bird warns him first, and then a well-dressed goose tells him, "You'll freeze to death if you stay here!" Finally, a dizzy-eyed bird adds, "And you won't have any food left either!" But Woody pooh-poohs their ideas, claiming, "Don't worry about me! I've got plenty of food. Right now... I'm goin' swimmin'!" and dives into the water, laughing his trademarked, famous laugh as he does. If the birds were ants, he'd be the grasshopper...

Hitting the water, Woody pops back up to the surface wearing a goony grin and with a lily pad atop his head. He takes his time to pull and then sniff deeply of the bloom from the flower on the lily pad, never noticing that the wind is starting to whip up from the north. The air begins to cool quickly, and as Woody bounces once more on the diving board, the wind freezes the air around him enough so that when he starts to fall towards the water, it is with his entire body encased in a large block of ice. He hits the now frozen surface of the pond hard enough that his block of ice shatters around him. "Sheesh...," Woody says to the camera, "...must be hard water in this place!" 

He stands up, but the winds blow him up into the sky, where a pair of clouds bat him back and forth like a badminton birdie. After a few hits, one of the cloud forms smack him hard enough that he plummets back to earth at a high velocity so that Woody gets rammed backwards through the mailbox in front of his house, ending up with his tail-feathers sticking out through the open end.

We next see a title card that reads, "The Next Day and 130° Below Zero". There is a brief pause, and then the words "Seems authentic" pop up in parentheses. At Woody's home, both the mailbox and his house are shrouded in deep snow. Seated at his dinner table, where he has placed a massive meal that surely must be most of the food in his possession, the uncaring woodpecker taunts the freezing wind rattling the shutters of his windows. "Go ahead! Blow your head off! See if I care! It's nice and warm, and I've got plenty of food!" The ferocious wind attacks his front door as well, pushing the door in at the top and bottom, but with the lock keeping the door in place ultimately. Woody taunts the wind again, saying "Go ahead and blow!" and spitting in the direction of the door as he blows back at it.

This was probably not a wise thing to dare in his case, as the door suddenly blasts open, carrying some snow in with it, and then a miniature whirlwind forms in the doorway. It whisks across the room and sucks up all of the food lining Woody's table, save for a single banana still held in Woody's grasp. The woodpecker's taunting comes back to haunt him as the whirlwind returns to suck away the banana as well. Woody yells at the whirlwind and chases it, but all he manages to do is to grab its tail, which spins him about and spits him out on the floor. The whirlwind speeds back through the doorway and off over the hill, carrying Woody's vast stores of nourishment with it.

Another title card pops up, this time reading: "Two weeks later, his food all gone, STARVATION stares Woody in the face". (The word "starvation" flickers on the card slightly to draw attention to it.) Sure enough, a shrouded death figure sits creepily staring across the table at the forlorn woodpecker, but Woody is clearly too tough to give in just yet. Even as the cigar-chomping ghoul laughs in his face, Woody gives it right back to the ghostly figure, laughing wickedly in return, and making it almost nervous as well.

A third card arrives to tell us, "One month later, there comes to this snow-bound village, a poor, hungry little kitty cat." Outside, mewling innocently and sadly near Woody's mailbox, is a tough-looking black and white cat wearing a winter cap and a scarf. To the camera, the cat grins wide and says in a growly, Amos 'n' Andy-style voice, "I'm that hungry kitty cat you just read about!" He meows inappropriately (given his actual maturity) once again, and then tells us, "I'm sorry hungry I could eat a..." He looks at the mailbox to find out what his next prey will be. "A... a woodpecker!" he says as he lines the word underneath with his clawed finger. The cat knocks on Woody's door, and the woodpecker excuses himself from his battle with the deathly figure at his table. "Pardon me, buddy! That's probably the grocery man!"

Woody answers the door, and both he and the cat jump in place when they spy each other. While it would seem obvious that the cat would covet the large talking bird for dinner, it seems Woody has surprisingly equal designs on the predator in return. With drool dripping fast from their mouths, each one imagines the other stuffed and steaming atop a large platter. Woody invites the cat into the house for dinner, but when the cat asks Woody what he is having, the bird says, "I'm gonna have cat... er, fish." Woody gets right to the point: murder. He says, "Lemme help you with your scarf!" and then proceeds to grab the scarf at both ends and tries to strangle the evil kitty. The cat, however, manages to slip out just in time, leaving Woody holding a knotted scarf. To the camera, the cat holds his sore neck and says, "You know, I think that pigeon tried to choke me!"

Woody tells the cat he must be cold from being outside, but the cat denies it. Woody insists that the cat step "over by the fire," which in this case means his open oven. The ravenous woodpecker pushes the cat inside and slams the door, proclaiming, "Oh boy! Feline fricasee!" and then whistling his joy. While Woody sets the table in a single dash and goes to grab catsup as a condiment, the cat pops out through the burner on the stove and hides. Woody returns to pour some catsup on his meal, but has trouble finding it as he peers in through the oven door. The cat advances on Woody with a huge meat cleaver, but Woody hides inside the burners of the stove. The chase turns into a predecessor of Whack-a-Mole (or even Itchy and Scratchy) as Woody leaps up out of the each burner as the cat takes a swipe at him with the cleaver.

Eventually, the cat gets carried away with his relentless swipes, so Woody decides to get right to the point. He pours catsup on the unknowing cat's tail and attempts to gnaw at it like a piece of corn on the cob. The cat, though, breaks his trance in time to pull his tail from Woody's attack. Woody speeds away as the cat first throws the cleaver at him, which crashes through the wall behind Woody, and then throws pots, pans, knives, and other kitchen implements in Woody's direction as the bird taunts him by spitting a raspberry and making faces at the cat. Woody yells, "You missed me!" but then the cat pins the bird against the wall by the neck with a grilling fork. "Now, my fine pigeon," says the cat as he marches up to Woody's face, "I'm going to pick you dry!" However, Woody has other ideas, and bends the handle of the grilling fork downward so that it springs up and clocks the cat on his chin. The force of the blow sends the cat flying across the room and into a large pot hanging in the fireplace.

Woody runs up to tend to the fire, but the cat reaches out and pulls the bird inside. A fight commences, in which he see the pot take the shape of both combatants. The battle sends the kettle rolling across the floor of the household, with sections of the metal container continuing to warp into the shapes of the adversaries. Finally, the cat lands a solid blow inside the overturned kettle, and lifts it up to show Woody has really gotten his bell rung. Suddenly, there is a mooing sound by the doorway, and both enemies spy a large, rather shabby-looking moose standing there. "Meese!" says Woody; "Mice!" says the cat. Then Woody says, "Moose!" and the cat replies with "Meese!" Both run to the door, a knife in Woody's hands and a cleaver in the cat's. They chase the moose out of the house and over the hill.

In the next shot, there is a huge pile of bones, and the camera pans right to show Woody and the cat greedily finishing off the last couple of bones. The moose's head, with exes in his eyes in the grand cartoon style, is mounted on the tree next to the cat, who exclaims, "Well, that was pretty good... but you know, I'm still hungry!" Woody, who suddenly (and for reasons I cannot surmise) has lost his helium-drenched voice, replies, "Yeah? So am I!" Woody picks up his knife with a wicked look straight into the cat's eye. The feline once more grabs his cleaver, and the two end up in a cloud of frenzied fighting to close out the picture. Roll the credits.

We hear a lot about just how violent the old Tom and Jerry shorts were, and I think it is both an exaggeration in most cases, though a few of the films still resonate as over the top in such violence. And while Tom was indeed trying to eat Jerry in some of them, more often he was just trying to get the better of him, since Jerry usually came out on top of everything. (And sometimes they even ended up working together and were downright friendly with ear other.) Clearly, Tom and Jerry were the basic model for Itchy and Scratchy (whom I name-checked earlier), but there were others out there creating cartoons that were just as blood-soaked in their outcomes. Think of Chuck Jones' trilogy of "rabbit season" shorts where Daffy gets his face blown off over and over and over again in increasingly inventive variations, or Freleng's Mouse Mazurka, where first a mouse and Sylvester drink nitroglycerine and explode while Russian dancing, only to end up chasing each other in the afterlife. (In Sylvester's case, he outright commits suicide to continue chasing the mouse, who only exploded by accident.)

I think Pantry Panic matches any of these films, or even many of Avery's MGM adventures, for manic intensity, especially once it gets away from the cutesy bird stuff at the beginning and Woody starts to starve to death. (It's not the only time Woody would face such a scenario either.) I rather like the more screwy version of Woody here; he would eventually get a little too docile and self-explanatory for me ("Boy, I better go do this before..."), and so it is great to see him just leaping into action here, almost before he has had a chance to even realize he is attempting those actions. He seems genuinely unhinged at every moment of this cartoon, and while I find that most appealing on its own level, I do understand creator Walter Lantz had to tone down his character eventually (just as most other major cartoon characters were).

Edging into the more horrific implications of this cartoon, the jump cut to the pile of moose bones and then the sight of the murdered moose's head on the tree are some really morbid touches that shock me today, even with my supposedly more open sensibilities to such things after decades as a horror movie fan. And there is just something delightfully gruesome about seeing two cartoon characters completely dispatch another character to whom we were just introduced mere seconds before. I know we are talking about a bird and a cat killing a moose to survive, but because these characters walk, dress, act and talk more like humans, it adds a level of confusion in identifying them as mere animals. As a result, in an effort like Pantry Panic, it plays in my head more like a cannibalism motif than one species of animal attempting to devour a different species. I see the differing species as humans instead and that establishes the mood of cannibalistic fever in my head. Then the film comes out seeming like another play on Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain having fever dreams and sizing each other up for dinner in The Gold Rush (1925) or even the twin starving Yosemite Sams that eventually go after the duck in Along Comes Daffy, but start out imaging each other as delicious foods. (There are so many other examples out there; it's a standard comedy trope.)

No problems here at home food-wise. I will not be sizing the Blueberry – our beloved cat – up for a pie, as we have plenty of desserts waiting in the kitchen below. Even now, as I finish this, the smells of turkey breast, gravy (gluten-free, of course), equally GF stuffing, and – the greatest of all Thanksgiving foods – green bean casserole are wafting upstairs to my office. I have thus far avoided going outdoors today, and that is fine with me since my weather app tells me it is a solid 93 degrees out there (3:00 p.m. PT). I don't have any fear of diving into a swimming pool and finding myself encased in a giant ice cube like Woody Woodpecker today, but neither would I be jumping into a disgusting pool in the first place.

With the slightest bit of luck, I would be celebrating today in somewhere much cooler, such as my old stomping grounds in Alaska, where is cold and snow and a lot of great friends (and a wee bit of family left). Or somewhere else where it is not 93 degrees. Oh, boo hoo, you might say, especially if that sort of weather appeals to you. That's fine, but it's not for me at all. Not a sun guy; definitely a rain guy, and still a snow guy. But I suppose that I should just accept my fate, since I have a wife that I adore and we have established ourselves down here in So Cal.

Me, I am just happy to have watched some cartoons (and a couple of old movies) today, along with a good chunk of the annual MST3K Turkey Day marathon, on my way to a tryptophan-induced (not really) food coma in about an hour or so. And somewhere tonight I will indulge in pumpkin pie (still GF). It's really how all days should go in this world that has been largely designed to drive us crazy. Why just this one day a year and not 365, I will never surmise. But I guess I am thankful for this one, if I can be thankful of anything in the past year. And believe me, it has been tough being thankful for even that one thing.

So let's just close with me saying Happy Thanksgiving to all of my friends, family and fellow animation fans. I love you all.

Now I just need to win me some airfare up to Alaska...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

Countdown to Halloween: Frankenstein's Cat (1942)

For the month of October, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc is taking part in an annual internet celebration known as the Countdown to Halloween. This is the fourth year that I have participated in this countdown, but the first with my Cel Bloc site. To find out more about the Countdown to Halloween, and to see a list of participating websites and blogs, go to http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/.

Frankenstein's Cat (1942)
Dir.: Mannie Davis
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Frankenstein's Cat almost backs into the shockingly high rating that I finally granted it on IMDb, and thus across the board on my various sites. (Believe, I too am shocked.) By no means the most accomplished film in the Terrytoons pantheon, this early entry in the frustratingly inconsistent Mighty Mouse series – surprisingly, only the second one out of eighty films the first incarnation of the super-powered rodent made – gets by in a strong way by having a certain intangible that makes even a common film rise above the muck for me: Halloween.

The film does not take place at Halloween, mind you. In fact, it is mentioned by the narrator early in Frankenstein's Cat that the action in the film takes place on "a warm midsummer's day". But Frankenstein's Cat is laden so heavily with dark atmosphere, horror film imagery, and monstrous action that it should be included automatically in any Halloween aficionado's collection of holiday-themed animation highlights. The film ends up being a delight for almost exactly the opposite reasons it may have been intended but still remains true to its source of inspiration: the Universal monster movies that were still currently in production at the same time this cartoon was released.

In a post last month in my set of reviews written in conjunction with my "shark film" theme for September, I discussed the eighth Mighty Mouse cartoon, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and the basic timeline of the series up to that point. No need to go into the entire thing again [you can read that review here], so to make it brief, it seemed that the filmmakers were desperate to find a common starting point for the series. Mighty Mouse was indeed an inspired choice for a parody of a popular comic book hero who had himself just broken through on the big screen via Max and Dave Fleischer's wonderful efforts (their Superman cartoon series is still a high point of non-cutesy animal animation to this day), but it should have also proved a good starting point for their own series.

Two problems: 1) Terrytoons really did not commit to a solid personality for the mouse, changing his temperament, look, costume, and even origin from film to film early on in the series; and 2) they couldn't even commit to his name. They called him Super Mouse for the first seven films in the series, but had changed it to Mighty Mouse by the time The Wreck of the Hesperus rolled over the waves. [In reviewing this cartoon, it is a cut TV print without the original titles and there is an obvious voiceover (with a different tone) that announces Mighty Mouse's presence instead of Super Mouse's when his big reveal occurs.]

In the very first Super Mouse cartoon, The Mouse of Tomorrow (also 1942), the diminutive hero is brought to life by an ordinary mouse who is inside a "super"-market seeing a predicament that needed to be solved, by bathing in "super"-soap, and indulging heavily in "super"-cheese, "super"-soup, and "super"-celery. It is not odd that a creature commonly considered a pest of our pantries and warehouse stores would find his powers by devouring human food resources, nor that he would be aided in gaining such powers due to being exposed by marketing hyperbole. (It's actually a nice touch that last part, though it doesn't come off as being an intentional thought.)

But here in Frankenstein's Cat, released just five to six weeks later and deep into November 1942 (missing the Halloween season completely), while it is still the eating of cheese that turns him into a superhero, it is a particular type of cheese (more on this later). In the third film, He Dood It Again, he still lives in the supermarket, in a giant mouse hole in the side of the building, and is Super Mouse the entire time, though he is only in portions of the film. In the fourth film, Pandora's Box, he takes a series of vitamins, leaping from bottles A, B, C, D, E, and XYZ; by the fifth film, Mighty Mouse Rides Again, he sleeps on the side of a star and only awakens when help is needed; and by the sixth, Down with Cats, he is once again Super Mouse the entire time but only shows up when things are their most dire, though he seems to be hanging out nearby. This takes the series one year into its existence, and the Super Mouse character, very close to changing his name for good to Mighty, has remained rather inconstant in origin and powers, and yet somehow the series as a whole is entirely too predictable.

Super Mouse is both pretty remarkable for his physical prowess but also rather dull for the fact that the outcomes are a given (but this is a failing in general of the superhero genre, at least for that day). It would take later films for the character to become really interesting for me, and truly, it was Ralph Bakshi's late 1980s television revival series that actually made me a Mighty Mouse fan. Not given a lot of exposure to early Terrytoons shorts meant that my viewings of the original Mighty Mouse in my youth was pretty limited, including suffering through an annoyingly crafted Filmation series in the late '70s, where he starred alongside Heckle and Jeckle. (And, of course, my obsession with Andy Kaufman's "Foreign Man" lip-syncing of the Mighty Mouse theme on Saturday Night Live in the mid-'70s.)

However, in that limited exposure to the early Terrytoons shorts as a kid, I did see Frankenstein's Cat (though I had no idea it was only the second film in the series). And like some of the early Heckle and Jeckle and Gandy Goose shorts I also managed to see at the time (I found them quite by accident on a local UHF station that I could only find sporadically), Frankenstein's Cat stuck pretty well in my head since then. Saying that the Mighty Mouse series was fairly generic early on is not to say there aren't highlight films in the mix, Frankenstein's Cat being one of them, with Pandora's Box (with the strangely frightening bat-cats) and The Lion and the Mouse being notable others. In Frankenstein's Cat, you have the trappings of a Universal horror film, including the requisite empathy for its title monster, draped over the top of a Mighty/Super Mouse cartoon. You get everything (well, nearly everything) that you could wish from either all rolled up into one animated super-ball.

The narrator tells us that the mice and birds had gathered on that midsummer day that I spoke of earlier for a celebration. We see mice dancing around a makeshift maypole, and bird flitting from house to house and around the trees joyously, due to have gone an entire year without being disturbed by the presence of a cat. Birds pick up flower after flower, and each one has a mouse inside of it, who rides the flower down to the ground gently as if they were parachutes. Once there, each mouse climbs on the back of his corresponding bird and goes for a joyride. A father canary also picks up his two newly hatched fledglings and takes them for a flight. He drops them off in midair and then swoops below to catch them softly on his back as they tumble head over heels.

However, for this film to fit the Halloween mold for me, Frankenstein's Cat has to be about more than just happy little mice and birds, and take a genuine turn towards the eerie and the scary. Just over a minute into the film, it does just that. On the canary's second pass through the air, one of his kids tumbles off early and a hard, stray gust of wind picks the little guy up and carries him off in the distance towards a strange, ominous-looking castle on a mountaintop. The baby bird is dropped off on the head of a falcon-style gargoyle that sticks out from a tower wall, where he is immediately surrounded by large, black bats that swoop all about him.

Atop the castle, we meet the title character. While we never meet the Dr. Frankenstein that created him in this film, we are introduced to a large black and orange tabby walking erect on what appear to be mechanically engineered legs. The narrator sums it up with his line, "What fiend of darkness haunts this place?" The creature ambles about and turns towards us in closeup so we get to see a better view of his body. His limbs are clearly jointed together as if built from an erector set, his torso is round and straight as if he had swallowed a huge cylinder of some sort, his tail seems constructed of several separate knots strung together, and he has long arms that reach down almost to his knees. His walk is staggered due to his mechanical means of locomotion as he patrols the turrets of the castle during the storm gathering over his heads. With the setting perfect for monster mayhem, the narrator shouts, "It's Frankenstein's Cat!" and then the creature indulges in a huge smile as he lifts his arms into the air and is lit up directly by a massive bolt of lightning.

Soon enough, Frankenstein's Cat notices the little bird stuck out on the gargoyle's head. Like any normal cat, the monster gives up his body to try and take an ill-advised swipe at the baby bird, but the bird is just enough out of the way that he is able to gain just enough control of his flight to veer off unharmed. Having fallen off the castle, Frankenstein's Cat plummets to the ground to its base, and then rises like the living dead (which we must assume he actually is). He shakes his arms upward at the sky and commences with a roar that sounds like a drunken lion. Off to the side of the castle, there is a machine that has a stick with a boot on the end of it. He turns his backside to the boot's toe, and then pulls a cord at the front of the machine, kicking himself in the rear over and over again. ('Twould appear this is not his first time at failure, if he has a machine to remind himself of them...) Following his self-served butt-kicking, the cat stomps away very angry.

Chasing after the baby bird as it flies awkwardly over the mountain desperate to escape, the angered monster cat shakes his fist in determination. Soon enough, the bird flies to the edge of the pond and just misses getting grabbed, but the cat is suddenly distracted by his own reflection in the water. Seeing himself, the cat becomes very upset at the monstrous face in the water, and screams in agony over his own perceived ugliness. He builds up enough gumption, however, to peek into the water again. This time, his reflection is the one that reacts in disgust and agony, swiping his paws over his eyes to hide himself. This rejection sends Frankenstein's Cat into a manic rampage. He stomps through the line of birdhouses and swats most of them down as he passes. He comes to a final white-and-red birdhouse, peers inside the hole, and then uses an electrical shock from his finger to set the house afire. It burns to a cinder, and it turns out the baby bird was inside, hiding in a bathtub. (Bird bath? Get it?)

The bird flies towards the mousey side of time, where the rodents see the monster cat coming and flee inside a stump where some of them live. The cat skips reaching through the front door and sticks his arm through the top of the stump, where a series of wooden slats have been used to create a non-exactly weatherproof roof. He fails to grab any mice, but a couple of them push a hot stove over to where the monster's hand is and give their nemesis a scalding burn. He pulls his now pulsing red hand out and uses his supernatural strength to blow it cool instantly, and then figuratively loses his own cool, kicking the stump over in a bully-like fashion. The baby bird flies out of the stump and flees to a nearby tree, where he hides in his parent's nest. The bird puts the pieces of his former egg home together to obscure himself, but the ravenous cat easily finds him and grabs the poor little guy.

Frankenstein's Cat carries the baby bird back to the castle, while other birds attack the cat from all sides along the way. Reaching the castle gates, the cat pulls the drawbridge closed to block the birds' advance. The mice gather en masse, and in the tradition of any Frankenstein flick, pick up torches and boards with nails embedded in them and charge the castle. Some of them attempt to swim the moat and climb the walls, while the monster throws bricks down at them. When one mouse makes it to the top, Frankenstein's Cat uses his shock power once again to jolt the mouse with electricity. More mice follow, and he jolts each one, their shocked bodies falling into the moat.

Elsewhere, inside the Super Market that serves as the base of "you know who" early on in the series (one of the few connecting traits in the first few films), a small brown mouse is listening intently over a candlestick phone's receiving device. "Help is needed!" says a staccato voice, much like one would hear on a police radio. "Help is needed! The monster is on the loose again!" The little mouse runs to a huge, mostly intact round of limburger cheese (so marked by a sign) and eats his way through it. The narrator asks, "Can this be the champion of the helpless?" When the mouse bursts through the side of the cheese round, he has turned into... well, Super Mouse, but the print that I have available has Mighty Mouse's name edited in Super Mouse's place. Super... Mighty... whatever the hero's name, you know pretty well he is going to get the job done in less than two minutes because that is how much time is left in the film. And we know this especially because, early in this series, Mighty's costume looks exactly like Superman's, except for the lack of a chest logo.

Super/Mighty Mouse (we shall go with Mighty Mouse after this) flies through the receiver of the phone and then through the phone cord, his body pulsing up through the wires to the transformer box on the telephone pole where he makes his presence known by crashing out into the open air. The mice and birds see their legendary hero zoom over their heads to the castle and raise their arms, beginning a wild cheer as they do. Frankenstein's Cat sees Mighty Mouse approaching his domain and starts to fret and worry. Mighty Mouse punches straight through the drawbridge of the castle and does battle with each of the big black bats, making short work of them. The monstrous cat charges Mighty with a large butcher's knife in hand, but this does not slow down the hero mouse for a second. No sooner has he hit the last bat than he suddenly has a sword in hand, and he and Frankenstein's Cat begin a furious melee through the halls and up and down the stairs of the castle, worthy of any period swashbuckler.

Fearing he has lost the butcher-knife-sword-fight, the monster cat ducks into a side room, but the hero mouse follows him. Dust and furniture fly out of the room while an unseen battle commences, and when it is done, we see Frankenstein's Cat bound by ropes to a chair. Mighty stands on a table and, in a tough guy voice standard to the era, tries to get the cat to spill the beans, or bird, as it were. "What didja do wit' da boid?" he asks the cat, and then slaps the monster's now fearful face several times. "So ya won't talk, eh?" Mighty flies briefly back down to the table and turns his x-ray vision on to the cat's midsection. Inside a spotlit area, we see the baby bird sitting on the series of pipes that seems to make up the mechanical cat's ribs. The little guy is holding his hands (wings) together in prayer, and seems to be talking to the heavens.

Suddenly, the cat struggles against his bonds and breaks free of the ropes and chair. (I am now not sure what it was for which the baby bird was praying.) Frankenstein's Cat shuffles sadly towards the open stone window and four bats fly up  and support each of his limbs. They carry the cat out into the sky to make his escape, but Mighty is fast on the monster's tail. He punches the cat in the rear but while the punch is mighty indeed, it does nothing to alter their flight. He flies ahead and circles back towards the monster cat, but the villain breathes fire from his mouth. Mighty Mouse pushes and punches his way up through the column of fire, until at last he pulls the surprised cat's head off of its shoulders and tosses it away. Mighty then flies around the cat's body, still being flown by the bats, and pulls on its stringed tail and lets go. The shockwave of snapping back at the body sets the rest of the cat free of the bats and flailing back down to earth.

As the cat's beheaded body tumbles through the air, the baby bird flies free of the hole in the cat's neck, but then the inexperienced fledgling begins his own freefall towards the ground. The body of Frankenstein's Cat crashes hard into the crowd a couple of feet from its head. The body sits up and starts to feel around blindly for its head, pops it back in place, and then the rebuilt Frankenstein's Cat throws its arms up into the air and turns tail, running as fast as it can towards the horizon and out of the picture. The baby bird is still tumbling down, however, but he is saved at the last second by a timely swoop from Mighty Mouse. The rodent hero delivers the baby back to his overjoyed, chirping parent. Mighty Mouse is then seen standing with his eyes closed and arms folded as he stands atop a small boulder, with the mice cheering and birds flying all around him. Flowers are thrown in his direction as the narrator (who really had very little to do in this short) sums up the picture by announcing, "Mighty Mouse... the Champion!" THE END.

Except for never seeing the mad scientist who built him nor the equipment that raised him to life, Frankenstein's Cat is still a nice condensing of a basic Frankenstein or other mad monster film from the '30s and early '40s. The monster has the built-in villain status that any cat seems to have when the victims in the cartoon are mice and/or birds, so its a wise choice in rendering this genre to the animated screen. We get the castle and the torches, we get the monster running amok and not just threatening the "villagers" (mice and birds), but also demolishing their property, and then the frenzied finale to stop the creature. The nicest touch here, though, is in adding just a dash of sympathy for the monster.

Certainly, Frankenstein's Cat himself is clearly lonely in his castle (I guess his loyal bats aren't too much in the way of conversation), but it is the pond scene where he does battle with his reflection where we, as viewers, are allowed to not just accept this film as just another "Mighty Mouse vs. the big bad cat" film. When he rails against his own visage in the water, we are granted a chance at empathy for this sad possibly misunderstood creature. Yes, his instincts, being at least part cat, are so ingrained he cannot help but go after the little bird (it seems such nutrition will do him little good when his insides are naught but metal piping). However, because of this scene and the cat's very clear displeasure at his own undertakings (the kicking himself in the pants punishment), he is actually given far more emotional depth than we normally get to see in the villain of a six-minute cartoon. It's a touch that is absolutely in concert with the Universal Frankenstein films, at least the original Karloff pictures where, ultimately, the monster really is the hero (this film does not take it quite that far).

Yeah, I thought that I was crazy, too, liking this film as much as it turns out that I do. On paper and in my head, I much prefer other later Mighty Mouse pictures, but for whatever reason, this one sticks around for me. The use of the castle's environs is really well done, as is the detail, and some of the odd little bits, such as the kicking machine, as well as the empathy angle for the monster, add just the right notes to put this short into repeated Halloween viewing for me. I hope that you take the chance to enjoy Frankenstein's Cat for yourself.

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...