The Mouse on 57th Street

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Airdate:	Runtime:
25 February 1961	5 min. 53 sec.

Series:

Merrie Melodies

MPAA Number:	Production Number:
19383	1543

Copyright Renewed:

29 January 1988

Crew

Voice Characterizations:

Mel Blanc
Ginny Tyler^[1]

Ink and Paint:

Joyce Walker (uncredited)

Layout Artist:

Maurice Noble
Owen Fitzgerald

Background Artist:

Philip DeGuard

Film Editor:

Treg Brown

Musician:

Milt Franklyn

The Mouse on 57th Street is a 1961 Merrie Melodies short directed by Chuck Jones.

Title[]

The title is a play on the 1933 film The House on 56th Street.

Plot[]

An unnamed mouse in a yellow hat helps himself to a 100-proof rum cake, which has made him more than a little drunk. The mouse staggers away, hiccupping.

The next morning, he has a severe hangover, and sounds of drilling at a nearby construction site give him excruciating pain. He grabs the nearest piece of ice he can find to apply to his head; the ice is the Sunflame Diamond from Spiffany's, and two policemen, one of them a lunkhead, are assigned to investigate the "theft" of the jewel. They bungle all their attempts to catch the mouse, who has the jewel tied to his head, with the running gag consisting of the idiotic Muldoon getting distracted over the jewel (followed on with the repeated quote "Oh de boy! The diamond!") which causes his fellow police partner to get all the bad luck due to Muldoon's stupidity.

As the chase intensifies, the jewel falls off the mouse's head and lands on the fellow policeman's head, causing Muldoon to continuously clobber him in the head, thinking its the diamond. The mouse observes this from the inside of the bakery, and seeks refuge in the exact same rum cake he ate the previous day.

Availability[]

Streaming[]

Notes[]

The jewelry store, Spiffany's, is a play on the Tiffany's jewelry stores. There is also a department store called Lacy's, which is based on the Macy's department stores. The Looney Tunes short "A Waggily Tale", features a department store called Stacy's.
The “New York Graphic”, one of the newspapers reporting on the diamond “theft”, contains an article announcing the resignation of producer John W. Burton, Cartoon Division G.M., and his successor, David H. DePatie, former head of Warner Bros. Commercial Films Company.
Another paper, the “New York Journal” contains an article titled “What’s Up, Doc?”, although it has nothing to do with Bugs Bunny.
This is the last Looney Tunes short that Michael Maltese wrote in the Golden Age of Animation.
MeTV aired a previously unreleased restored print of the cartoon on "Toon In with Me". This restoration was later made available on Warner Bros. Discovery RIDE. In 2024, Warner Archive released it on Looney Tunes Collector's Choice: Volume 3, with most of the digital artefacts removed.
Vitaphone release number: 2983^[2]