Mouse in Manhattan

**Mouse in Manhattan** is a 1945 *Tom and Jerry* short directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

## Plot

Jerry has enough of the country life and decides to leave for the city. He writes a goodbye letter to Tom saying he's off to see the city sights. In a series of antics in Manhattan, 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 comes out with his face red. 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 run 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). Upon returning home, it would seem that Tom had been sleep the entire time that Jerry was gone (and thus didn't read the note that Jerry left, ultimately unaware of the mouse's antics in the big city). Jerry tears up the (unread) note and kisses Tom, waking him up in the process. The short ends with Jerry nailing a sign reading "Home Sweet Home" above his mousehole, and entering afterwards, choosing to remain in the countryside.

## Animation Error

* During the scene featuring Jerry dancing with the dolls, after the dance with the black-haired and blond-haired ones, he looks at an orange-haired doll and begins to dance with it. A few seconds later, when Jerry and the doll dance on the plate, the orange-haired doll's hair becomes blond by for rest of the scene.

## Censorship

* On Cartoon Network and Boomerang, the scene of Jerry's head being used to polish a black shoe cuts off before the viewer can see Jerry in blackface. TBS and TNT (in the days when they aired classic shorts before moving them to Cartoon Network), surprisingly, did not edit this part.

## 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.

## Notes

* Tom plays a rather insignificant role in this cartoon. As he shows little to no action throughout the entire short, only being shown sleeping in the beginning and the end of the episode. Making this the first cartoon to focus only on one of the duo characters.
* This was the first cartoon to be released after V-E Day.
* This cartoon is possibly a nod to Aesop's fable, "*The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse*", where two mice visit the countryside and the city, only to end up going through so many dangers while being in the city. The country mouse concludes he would rather live the countryside than the city, due to better safety.