Happy new year a little late everyone! Starting the year with mice is only fun if they’re not *real* mice; the cartoon variety is just fine with me. We live out in the country just south of Ann Arbor, as the city and progress continue to encroach. Fortunately, we’re pretty secure now and the mice are only outside.. but it took some work to seal up with 1929 Sears kit house. But, we’ll concentrate on the drawn kind!

First, a little beginning of the year Thunderbean news:

I get a handful of weeks off from the school in December through early January; it’s a great time to organize and get a lot of Thunderbean things moving along. We’ve been working on the ‘1929’ set, getting a batch of special sets finished and dubbed, and working on the Cartoons for Victory Blu-ray as well as the Bunin Alice set, and a handful of other things. The Rainbow Parade 2 set is finally getting to replication as well. The Toby the Pup Fan Club package is finished, finally, and I’m properly dressed for that occasion. We have a new pre-order for the year as well, ‘1930’, available at the Thunderbean Shop for pre-order.

The thing I’m most looking forward to is a project we can’t talk about yet. In the next month or so a whole bunch of reels will start scanning for that project, and I couldn’t be more excited.

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Now — onto today’s cartoon: Mischievous Mice (1934)

It’s been a lot of fun (and work) prepping materials for MeTV broadcast. I’m working through the Van Bueren Cubby Bear cartoons, I’m tweaking things and making them look as good as they can using the masters we made in 2016 for the Blu-ray. I thought Mischievous Mice would be a fun one to show since it’s such an oddity. It was made by Harman-Ising for the Van Beuren Studio. For whatever reason, even though the film was finished, it was never given to Van Beuren for release. Perhaps it was rejected, or perhaps the film was made juts as the studio’s deal with MGM was coming into place. However it came to pass, Harman ended up with the film, and ended up releasing it many years later, in 1948, as part of a package of films for rental at first, then later for Television broadcast. Since the film was never scored, Harman used the a piece of the score from Easy Does It (1946), an elaborate industrial film for Stokey/Van Camp.

Including this cartoon, the three Harman-Ising Cubby shorts are really more Bosko than they are Cubby. All are pretty enjoyable. One wonders why the design sensibility was altered so much for the same series, and if the goal was for Harman-Ising to take over production from Van Beuren once their contract ended with Warners.

Mischievous Mice is a strange curio. While not as elaborate as the other two shorts made for Van Beuren by Harman-Ising, it’s still well animated and designed. Most of the prints that have shown up have the ‘Radiovision’ end title as this print does. It’s actually a combination of three prints — two that I had, and Mark Kausler’s.

Have a good week all!