User Reviews

A bunch of mice are living in a shack, where their friend, a dog, brings them food and protects them from a clowder of cats. However, when the cats seize the dog, stick him in a crate and put it on a railroad track where a train is about to smash everything, in comes MIGHTY MOUSE.

Mighty Mouse, Paul Terry's most successful series, was aimed squarely at very young children who could imagine themselves as tiny mice, with a Superman figure to protect them. Any interest I might have in the series was worn out long ago, because they soon settled into the same plot line: mice are threatened by cats, Mighty Mouse beats up the cats, mice jump and cheer. There are a couple of good gags early on in this particular short -- I like the one about the keyhole -- and Terry maintained a level of competence throughout his forty-year career as a cartoon producer, but this is much of a muchness and as forgettable as almost all of the Mighty Mouse cartoons are.

Generally the Mighty Mouse series was very formulaic and even early on it started to get very repetitive. By all means his cartoons were far from unwatchable and did have good points, but there are very few if any that fit my definition of great (the best mostly being merely decent). Mighty Mouse himself was not a bad character but at the same time personality-wise he was pretty one-dimensional with not a huge amount to him.

1945's Terrytoons output was never dreadful, the worst of it though still being quite mediocre, but it was also never really great. With 'Post War Inventions' coming closest to being an exception and one of Terrytoons' best certainly in quite some time. So like all the previous years a relative mixed bag overall. 'The Silver Streak' is among the weaker one for most of the same reasons for other lesser Mighty Mouse cartoons from this particular period, sadly it was quite early on in this series (his last cartoon being from 1961 and the series was already beginning to lose freshness).

There are certainly good things, none of the Terrytoons cartoons were irredeemable even the very bad ones (which did exist early on). The music is its usual lush and characterful self, not just adding to the action but enhancing it as well. The animation is equally great in quality, especially the backgrounds and landscapes, the characters are well drawn and the colours are really beautiful on the eye.

Of the characters, as was the case for most of the Mighty Mouse cartoons, the best were by quite some way the cats. Fairly typical adversaries for a Mighty Mouse cartoon, and somewhat derivative, but there is at least some personality and menace. The dog was a nice character too, not exceptional but certainly more interesting than the mice characters.

Speaking of the mice, they were bland and very little different to other mice characters from the Mighty Mouse cartoons and even the whole of Terrytoons' output, and mice were frequent characters with them. Mighty Mouse himself is limited and actually not hugely important to the proceedings other than gimmicky heroics in the last third of the cartoon.

Conflict lacks tension, with such bland characterisation and a pace that never really comes to life, and what little there is of the story is formulaic, veering on too cute and routine with not an awful lot of momentum. The gags are far too few in number, next to none, and when there are attempts at any they are not funny, tired and seen it all before. The writing is pretty corny. All common problems for the lesser entries in the Mighty Mouse series.

In summation, pretty lacklustre and doesn't even reach bronze let alone silver. 4/10

This entire cartoon series was so dull. It's always a group of mice who are being persecuted by some cats (or other dangerous creatures). They manage for a while until it gets to be too much. Soon, Mighty Mouse shows up and it's lights out. There is no suspense and the plots have little imagination. This is no exception.