Mouse in Manhattan
| Mouse in Manhattan | |
|---|---|
| Tom and Jerry series | |
 Mouse in Manhattan reissue title card. | |
| Directed by |
William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
| Produced by | Fred Quimby (unc. on original issue) |
| Story by |
William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
| Voices by | Billy Bletcher (uncredited) |
| Music by | Scott Bradley |
| Animation by |
Kenneth Muse Ed Barge Ray Patterson Irven Spence |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) |
 July 7, 1945 |
| Color process | Technicolor |
| Running time | 8:06 |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | The Mouse Comes to Dinner |
| Followed by | Tee for Two |
Mouse in Manhattan is a 1945 one-reel animated cartoon and is the 19th Tom and Jerry short released in American theaters on July 7, 1945 and reissued in 1953. It is one of the few episodes that only one of the duo plays a major role.
Plot
Jerry has enough of the country life and decides to leave to the city. He writes a goodbye letter to Tom saying he's off to see the city sights. In a series of antics in New York City, he gets stuck in gum on the floor of Grand Central, ends up as a makeshift shoe-polisher, admires the towering skyscrapers, and even attempts to literally climb the Empire State Building, but to no avail, and gets scared when he sees the statue and runs into a woman's green heeled shoes. He looks straight up at her dress and walks under her shoes. As Jerry makes it there, he sees a woman's large toe and polished toenail at the bottom of her shoe and he uses it as a mirror to make him look nice. After he's done grooming: he walks away and accidentally falls into a stream beside the sidewalk and floats away on a bottle cap.
He admires beautiful girls wearing pretty shoes and also Times Square before falling down the sewer, has a close shave with oncoming traffic, gets nauseated in an elevator, moves under the carpet to the Starlite Room and moves again where he bumps into a doorway, crawls into a room and sees a woman there scared and naked as he moves back out all blushed. He looks up at the sign which says Powder Room and runs to the Check Room near the Powder Room he passed. As he tries to fix the top hat he was on, it pops up fast squishing him down and down again before he bounced out of the room. After he fixes his hat, he sees the woman from the powder room and he jumps on the back of the train dress behind her legs and takes a ride. He almost falls down the drain and gets knocked off by the plant handle in the way, gets back up and follows the direction where she went so he can have fun with her shoes and go home with her but instead heads toward the table and dangles precariously over the city on an ever-breaking candle. Later, he dances with several placecards (in the form of attractive women).
While dancing, Jerry loses his balance and gets stuck in a champagne bottle which pops him out of the building and he falls all the way to the ground with the help of a sock on a clothesline which becomes his parachute. He lands in a dark alley in a puddle; sneezes and is heard and scared off by an alley full of vicious cats. He then hurtles across the city on trash cans, one of which hits a fire hydrant and sends him flying through a jewelry shop window, after which he is shot at by the police. As Jerry escapes the city (nearly being ran over by an uptown express train on one of the Interborough Rapid Transit lines in the process): he quickly races over the George Washington Bridge, empty highway, and railroad tracks back to the countryside, (deciding citylife is not for him) where he finds Tom still asleep (apparently unaware that Jerry was gone). He tears his unread note and kisses Tom, waking him up in the process, before nailing a sign reading "Home Sweet Home" above his mousehole, and entering afterwards.
Censorship
- On Cartoon Network, the scene of Jerry's head being used to polish a black shoe cuts off before the viewer can see Jerry in blackface.
Production
This is the second Tom and Jerry cartoon to have animation by Ed Barge, although this is the first time he was credited. The first Tom and Jerry cartoon with animation by Ed Barge was Quiet Please! which was released some months later.