Little Blabbermouse (1940) User Reviews

Mr. Fields liked children - if they were parboiled!

[theowinthrop · 6/10 · 3 March 2007]

A typical cartoon "Merrie Melodie" from Warners involving a mouse who sounds and looks like W. C. Fields offering a tour of a closed department store to his fellow mice, in a wire basket on cables (used to transfer goods from department of the store to another). The price for the tour is $.10. Even when giving his spiel to the would-be passengers he is pestered by a mouse kid (the title named "Little Blabbermouse") who jabbers away every now and then - annoying the child hating Fields - clone mouse. But he had a dime, so he is able to get a place in the basket-car.

The film shows such things as disappearing vanishing cream jars, cough medicine bottles that are coughing, and powder puffs singing and dancing to "Shake Your Powder Puff". In fact the cartoon (being a Warners Studio product) uses such standards as "Singing in the Bathtub" and "We're In the Money" from their music department. It's an easy to take cartoon, punctuated by mild Fieldsian comments by the guide mouse, and by Little Blabbermouse's unstoppable, fast, and barely intelligible string of comments when he makes any. A last minute chase due to a bounding cat chasing the mice back to the mouse-hole they came from leads to the Fields-clone finally bubbling over in anger and using an bottle of alum go good effect.

Cartoons like this remind us how the choice of surviving characters in all the cartoon studios was a chance affair. Little Blabbermouse was a tiresome one note character (unlike Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck or even figures like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam - all of them could surprise occasionally due to the richness of their characters). This was a winnowing process in all of the studios. Disney for example tried to push a character named Horace Horsecollar in the 1930s with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy (and Pluto) and it didn't really work. With Popeye it was simpler - the Fleischer group just absorbed the main figures from Segar's "Thimble Theater". So Popeye, Olive, Bluto, Wimpy, Poopdeck Pappy, and Swee' Pea were permanent, more or less. But it was rare that the Sea Hag, Wimpy's enemy Geezil, Bertha the Goon, or Olive's brother Castor Oyl showed up, if at all.

Little Blabbermouse appeared maybe in five Warner cartoons tops, and then drifted into that weird oblivion for abandoned cartoon figures.

drugstore mouse boy

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 19 October 2012]

The first appearance of the over-talkative rodent was Friz Freleng's "Little Blabbermouse", in which a mouse resembling W.C. Fields hosts a tour of a drugstore full of puns. Dangers arrives in the form of a cat. The plot appeared again in "Shop Look and Listen", only that time set in a department store.

These cartoons were always some of the neatest, even if the jokes were pretty hokey. The theme of inanimate objects coming to life of course reached its apex with Bob Clampett's "Book Revue". Still, this one has some neat stuff (like the coins singing "We're in the Money"). Pretty interesting.

"Can I get in for half price if . . . "

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 24 March 2016]

" . . . I keep one eye closed?" title character LITTLE BLABBERMOUSE asks the barker/tour guide for a late-night cable car journey through a closed drug store. This Warner Bros. animated short samples about two dozen songs from the Warner Sheet Music Collection of its day, with the trio of coins singing "We're in the Money" including an already collectible 1908 Indianhead cent, as well as a 1926 Mercury Dime and a 1936 Washington Quarter (both of which have since been melted down illegally for their silver value). One of the signs in the window of this drug store states that people can buy "onion sandwiches" for 10 cents each at its lunch counter. During the Great Depression, the Onion Sandwich was a staple in most folks' diets, but the Art of making this dish largely disappeared when FDR's Better Days arrived. Since we're just a Cruz Presidency away from a Greater Depression, here's a Top Onion Sandwich Recipe passed down through many generations of My Family: 1)Get 2 slices of White Bread. 2)Slather one side of each bread slice with butter (or whatever butter substitute you can afford). 3)Cut 3/8" thick slice of onion large enough to cover most of one bread slice. 4)Salt the top side of the onion slice to taste. 5)Place second slice of bread over the onion slice, butter side down. 6)Enjoy. 7)Gargle.

More evidence of what Looney Tunes was like before its renaissance.

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 16 January 2022]

In the 1940s, Looney Tunes became one of the best cartoon studios, if not the best. Their shorts were very funny and edgy. However, up until the likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck becoming mainstays, the studio struggled. And for every really good cartoon they made, they made several ultra-cute cartoons with singing...something that just hasn't aged well.

In the short, a W. C. Fields-like mouse gives a tour of a store to other mice. One of them is a kid that talks non-stop...and that is THE joke in the cartoon. The impersonation of Fields was only fair and the jokes were few. Combined with some singing, it's well animated but ultimately forgettable.

Musical pharmacy

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 21 May 2019]

Have a lot of appreciation for Friz Freleng, and like and even love a lot of his cartoons featuring some of animation's most legendary characters. Once he hit his stride and his style evolved, although his early stuff is also worth watching for mainly curiosity, much of his work was very well made with outstanding music, very funny writing and one could see why the characters revered so highly now were so influential and appealed so much. Less so early 60s onward, when time and budget constraints showed.

'Little Blabbermouse' was made when Freleng was not yet at his very best and is not going to be for everybody. It is wholly dependent on whether one likes music revue/spot gag cartoons and whether one can endear to the titular character. For me, while it is not a great cartoon by any stretch and there are a couple of big problems with it, 'Little Blabbermouse' was an interesting cartoon and a mostly entertaining one with several great merits.

As said, whether one likes 'Little Blabbermouse' is going to be largely dependent on whether Little Blabbermouse appeals as a character to the viewer. Am going to be honest, even for a character who was deliberately meant to be annoying that aspect was overdone and outstayed its welcome too early, with the constant over-talkativeness being at first mildly amusing but with each interruptions it became increasingly corny and makes the viewer want to yell stop. It clearly intended to amuse but irritated instead.

While he was never the most subtle of voice actors, Mel Blanc still deserves being called one of the greatest who ever lived with the unparallelled ability to voice multiple characters and bring so much life and an individual identity to each one, but this is a rare case of me feeling that his voice work grated and that the over-talkativeness was in serious need of a toning down.

The story is paper thin and merely a series of musical sequences and gags. Parts are a bit hokey and corny, mostly to do with Little Blabbermouse.

However, the rest of the characters more than make up for it. The tour guide, a WC Fields caricature, is a far more interesting and entertaining character, and what was said by him amused, educated and intrigued. Cannot fault Tedd Pierce's voice acting here either, his Fields voice spot on. The inaminate objects are all great fun too and throughout. The gags are on the most part very amusing, if not exactly hilarious, some of them are visual when objects live up to their names and that is done imaginatively.

Lots of energy can be seen here, structurally it flows naturally and never loses coherence and it doesn't get too cute, which is a good thing. The pharmacy setting is made great use of and the ending is satisfying.

Furthermore, the animation is very good. It is lush and vibrant in colour and meticulous and beautifully drawn in detail. The character designs are fluid, well drawn and distinctive of Frleeng. Carl Stalling's music is lush and characterful, with clever orchestration and a mastery of not just adding to the action but enhancing it as well (Stalling was a near-unequalled master at this, though Scott Bradley gave him a run for his money). The pre-existing music is exuberantly arranged and makes one smile and tap their feet.

Overall, nice cartoon, although the titular character is an annoyance which brings things down sadly. 7/10

Little Blabbermouse is an entertaining Friz Freleng musical cartoon

[tavm · 8/10 · 29 November 2008]

Just discovered this on the Misce-Looney-ous site linked from YouTube. In this one, a mouse barker who sounds like W.C. Fields tells his customers to take a ride in a basket for 10 cents. One little boy mouse who talks constantly bothers the Fields mouse but is tolerated by him when he offers his coin. On the ceiling ride in the store we see lots of products that literally live up to their names and many of them sing some popular songs that are in the Warner catalogue. I'll stop there and say what a very amusing and entertaining cartoon this was and with Friz Freleng as director it's no surprise how good musically this short was. One of the voices here is Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft who I didn't recognize as I watched this. Maybe I will when I decide to see this again...