When I reviewed the movie Mouse Hunt at the beginning of the year, I mentioned that villainous mice are something of a novelty in popular culture (as opposed to villainous rats). Clearly, I dropped the ball in saying nothing about this short, because if there's any particularly obvious precursor to Mouse Hunt, it's Scaredy Cat (1948), Chuck Jones' dark and demented contribution to the world of murine horror. Many of the same basic plot elements are there - a couple of sitting ducks move into a dark and secluded old house, unaware that they've set themselves up for a world of trouble from the voracious vermin that dwell within. Like the titular creature from Mouse Hunt, these rodents are to be underestimated at the protagonists' own peril, and the situation rapidly descends into a cut-throat battle of life and death. Jones, even more so than Mouse Hunt, has a ball bringing out the hair-raising possibilities of the scenario. The mice here are threatening because they are, for the most part, the unseen; an omnipresent menace that lurks within every hidden nook and cranny, constantly watching and conspiring against the central figures, but only periodically bringing their malevolence (which is considerable) to the surface.
Scaredy Cat was the first in a trilogy of horror-orientated cartoons helmed by Jones starring Porky Pig and Sylvester The Cat, who are envisioned here in a master-pet relationship. In Scaredy Cat, only Porky receives title billing, but it is Sylvester who is the main driving force throughout the cartoon, and the character with whom the viewer sympathises. Audiences were already familiar with the lisping tuxedo cat from the Tweety cartoons of Friz Frelang (although Scaredy Cat marked the first short in which he was identified as Sylvester), but this was first occasion that Jones had worked with the character, and his interpretation of Sylvester differed notably from Frelang's. The lisp never comes into play, for Sylvester is rendered completely mute in this trilogy, and he's less preoccupied with exercising his predatory inclinations than he is with his unwavering anxiety about becoming something else's prey. His sense of self-preservation is certainly greater than that of his co-star, for Porky remains stuck in oblivious mode throughout virtually the entire trilogy. Although Sylvester would sooner avoid trouble altogether, Porky has a tendency to drag them both right into it, necessitating that the cat save the unwitting Porky's bacon while Porky misconstrues his every action and unleashes no end of verbal (and sometimes physical) abuse on on him (you can see how Courage The Cowardly Dog also owed a huge debt to this series). It's a role which seems perfectly suited to Sylvester, who even in shorts that cast him in the predatory role, can't help but exude a perpetual victim status. Unlike Wile E. Coyote, who really is his own worst enemy, or Ralph Wolf, who has the luxury of being able to quit at the end of each day, Sylvester lives in a world that is very blatantly out to get him 24/7. A series of shorts specifically designed to explore the possibilities of him being pushed to his absolute tipping point seems like a valid and natural move for him. The Sylvester/Porky trilogy does an inspired job of enabling the viewer to get a glimpse of the world through Sylvester's paranoid eyes, and discover that it is every bit as brutal and hazardous as he believes it is.
That hazard, in the case of both Scaredy Cat and its first sequel, Claws For Alarm (1954), takes the form of legions of murderous murids who spend most of the time lurking in the shadows, sharpening their numerous blades and waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Make no mistake, Scaredy Cat is not your average cat and mouse cartoon, and not just because the usual dynamics of the predator/prey hierarchy are subverted. These mice aren't the lovable, plucky house pests endemic to the Golden Age of Animation. They are killers, implied to have slaughtered goodness-knows-how-many of the house's previous occupants (the short contains a particularly horrifying moment where Sylvester witnesses them hauling off the last of their most recent batch of victims, the household cat, and realises that he and Porky will be next on the chopping block). What motivates the mice in Claws For Alarm is unclear, but in Scaredy Cat they seem to be part of a sinister cult that murders ritualistically. And they're legitimately terrifying. Obviously, it's a daft scenario and Scaredy Cat, brimming with all the visual wit and energy one would expect from a Jones cartoon, plays itself predominantly for comic effect. Nevertheless, I don't think this short receives nearly enough credit for how well it succeeds as a horror. Jones clearly understood the rules of the horror game, and the sense of dread is maintained terrifically throughout (to the extent that the absurdity of the scenario only makes it all the more unsettling) - there's the cold, foreboding atmosphere of the house, with its many dark and unexplored corners, the stretches of eerie inertia, in which we know that danger is stirring just out of sight, and Jones' smartly minimalist approach to the horror itself; the mice are seen only sparingly, and we are shown only the surface details of their depraved agenda. The fear of the unknown becomes so overwhelming that we have no trouble identifying with Sylvester's plight of having to avoid facing the darkened kitchen alone, a fate we and he realise is tantamount to being banished to oblivion. (Note: the cartoons of yore had a very flippant attitude toward suicide, and Scaredy Cat contains a gag that may be testing to modern sensibilities, where Sylvester threatens to put a bullet in his brain instead of being forced into the kitchen - it does, however, play into the generally macabre feel of the short.)
Most fans would agree that Scaredy Cat is by far the stand-out of the trilogy, and I see little reason to dispute that, although I think Claws For Alarm is a very good and underrated short that, despite retreading much of the same ground as its predecessor, feels like a perfectly credible reinterpretation. (The third short, Jumpin' Jupiter (1955), which in place of killer mice has Porky and Sylvester abducted by aliens and whisked away to the titular planet, is easily the least of the bunch, for the scenario, while sinister, has none of the malevolence of the earlier cartoons.) Noteworthy is that the mice Porky and Sylvester are up against in Claws For Alarm are not the same ones they had previously encountered in Scaredy Cat. The mice in Claws are largely obscured from view, existing mainly as silhouettes and as beady yellow eyes peering out from various crevices - the one mouse who does appear, briefly, in plain sight is pointed and scrawny, and looks, for all the world, like a murine version of Wile E. Coyote. The mice in Scaredy Cat have a greater air of familiarity, for their character designs were transplanted directly from those of Hubie and Bertie, two mice who had pestered Porky in an earlier Jones short, Trap Happy Porky (1945). There's little overtly sinister about the mere designs of the mice in Scaredy Cat, but I would argue that that this, in a way, makes their homicidal leanings even more disturbing. They look, beguilingly, like generic cartoon mice, and yet they practice the most inexplicably ghastly of activities. It's almost like the animation equivalent of the seemingly ordinary boy next door who had various body parts concealed around his house. Cartoon mice, even at their most endearing, have a tendency, overwhelmingly, to be bastards (cartoon sciurines too), and Hubie and Bertie were certainly no exception (have you seen the short where they trick Claude Cat into thinking that he died during a feigned surgical operation?), but the chilling indifference which these particular mice carry out their grotesque misdeeds is on a whole other level of warped. It's made all the more troubling for the fact that the mice, like Sylvester himself, are mute and (with one glaring exception) nary make a peep throughout the short. Their menace is as unheard as it is unseen.
Also in the short's favour is that the narrative is genuinely unpredictable, and milks its chills from the most devilishly unexpected of places. There's a sequence where an incapacitated Sylvester is lowered beneath the kitchen floor and held captive by the mice (earlier on we saw a moment in which Porky narrowly avoided the same fate), only to emerge in a severely blanched state two hours and fifty minutes later. What Sylvester saw beneath the floorboards within that time is left entirely to our imaginations, but it was clearly nothing good. It's all incredibly unsettling, but the really unpleasant, blood-curdling part occurs seconds later, when Sylvester staggers upstairs to the sleeping Porky, and makes his only vocalisation of the short. Forget the lisp, though - Sylvester meows like a real cat. And it's freaky, a rattling disturbance following that extended period of silent, understated horror. There was another moment that honestly shocked me the first time I saw it, as a kid, because it absolutely did not play out as I was expecting. I refer to the truly game-changing part of the cartoon when Porky resolves to demonstrate to Sylvester that there's nothing in the kitchen by going in there himself. Given the formula the short had been following up until now, I fully expected Porky to find the kitchen empty, thus making Sylvester look even crazier from his perspective. But no. Instead, Porky walks directly into the very peril that Sylvester had tried to warn him of, and he suffers the horrifying consequences. The mice capture him, and start to march him away to one of their ritual executions.
Something that Scaredy Cat has that neither of its sequels even attempted to replicate is a dramatic climax in which Sylvester is ultimately validated not only in Porky's eyes, but also his own. Following such an intense build-up, this gives the viewer a catharsis, as Sylvester reaches an epiphany in which he realises that he was always more powerful than the thing that has been scaring him this entire time. When Porky is captured by the mice, Sylvester flees the building, but does not get far before he is stopped by his conscience, who will not allow him to abandon Porky. Among other things, his conscience reminds him, through a series of diagrams, of the relative sizes of a cat and a mouse. This gives Sylvester the resolve and the confidence to return to that dreaded house and attack the murid occupants with such ferocity that he sends the lot of them packing.
Scaredy Cat might have all the trappings of a horror-comic masterpiece, but there is arguably one tiny snag that keeps it from being totally perfect, and that is of course the ending. It's one of the reasons why I'm grateful for the existence of Claw For Alarm, as above all else, it was a welcome opportunity to revise the scenario with an ending more authentic to the horror genre. Here, the short chooses to surrender all menace in the last few seconds, closing with a non-sequitur that's going to be utterly baffling to modern audiences. This is a Sylvester short, and obviously a character as ill-fated as he cannot be allowed to have too triumphant an ending, even in one such as this where he is unambiguously the hero; as Porky thanks the faithful feline for saving his life, we discover that a single, hood-wearing mouse has stayed behind, and it proceeds to bonk Sylvester with a mallet. That in itself is a classic horror trope - the protagonists think they are safe, only to discover that their demons won't be so easily vanquished - only here it's followed up by the mouse removing his hood, and proclaiming that "Pussycats is the cwaziest people!" while laughing uproariously. Iris out. I'm sorry, what?
Naturally, this is an ending confused the heck out of me as a child, and my reaction today is much the same. Nowadays, I appreciate that it's a reference to contemporary comedian Lew Lehr, who at the time was well-known for his catchphrase, "Monkeys is the cwaziest people!" Scaredy Cat was not the first Looney Tunes cartoon to tip its hat to Lehr; in fact, it wasn't even the first to use that specific variation on Lehr's catchphrase (that honor goes to another Porky short, The Sour Puss). And that's all well and good, but why is it here? What's the relevance of the Lehr reference to a horror situation involving spooky houses and killer mice? Is there some other joke I'm not getting? Or is it a case of Jones not knowing how to end the cartoon, and opting to do something else totally unexpected that took us back, resolutely, into the realm of pure comedy? I remain divided as to the effectiveness of this closing gag; a case can certainly be made that its non-sequitur lunacy is entirely keeping with the short's unpredictable nature, and if nothing else it's sufficiently weird. But, as its multiple appearances in other Looney Tunes shorts demonstrate, it's also something of a stock punchline, one that defuses the menace of the mice and raises questions as to how we're ultimately supposed to interpret them. Are they just a bunch of goofballs messing around, after all? It is, at the least, an unforgettable ending, and perhaps that's befitting enough for a short that goes all-out on the discombobulation front.
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