Cheese Chasers
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| Cheese Chasers | |
| Merrie Melodies series | |
 This is a dream?! |
|
| Directed by | Chuck Jones |
|---|---|
| Story by | Michael Maltese |
| Animation by | Ken Harris Ben Washam Lloyd Vaughan Phil Monroe |
| Produced by | Chuck Jones |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date | August 25, 1951 |
| Format | Technicolor, |
| Language | English |
| IMDb page | |
Cheese Chasers is a 1951 Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, and starring Hubie and Bertie in their final appearances of the Classic era. Also starring are Claude Cat and a bulldog predecessor to Marc Antony. Mel Blanc plays Claude and Hubie, while Stan Freberg plays Bertie.
[edit] Synopsis
At the end of a raid on a cheese factory, Hubie steps out of a wheel of cheese fat and nauseated. Bertie stumbles out after. Hubie determines that, based on the amount of cheese the average mouse eats in their lifetime (12 lbs.), they've eaten enough to have lived two thousand years. Determining that they can no longer stomach cheese, and with nothing else to live for, they determine their only course of action: suicide. They return home, where they write a generic suicide note ("Goodbye, cruel world!"), and introduce themselves to the gullet of a sleeping Claude Cat.
Claude immediately wakes up and spits the mice out. Believing that "something's rotten in Denmark", he figures the mice are poisoned, and refuses to eat them. After several attempts to refuse to eat them, and attempting to convince himself it's all a bad dream, he determines he can no longer eat mice, and also decides to committ suicide. Leaving an equally generic suicide note, Claude heads outside and punches the sleeping bulldog.
The bulldog sees Claude standing there with a blindfold and a cigarette, and asks what's going on. When Claude begs the dog to "massacre" him, the bulldog thinks "something's decidedly fishy here". It gets worse when Hubie and Bertie run out, trying to get Claude to eat them. The bulldog figures out that Claude no longer wants to eat mice, and the mice now hate cheese, but it doesn't make sense to him. After trying to use an adding machine to figure it out, he goes nuts, and runs after a dog catcher wanting to get committed, with Claude and the mice in hot pursuit, still hell-bent on ending their own lives.
[edit] Quotes
- Hubie: "Bert, an average mouse eats 12 pounds of cheese in a lifetime. I figure tonight we've lived 2,000 years."
- Bertie: "Hubie, I'll never be able to touch the stuff again."
- Hubie: "Me neither. So there's nothing left to live for."
- Bertie: "You mean?!"
- Hubie: [nods solemnly] "Come on, Bert, let's get it over with."
- Bertie: "Yeah yeah. Over." *hic*
[edit] External links
- The cartoon can be seen on the Looney Tunes website here.
