40 Fun Facts About Mighty Mouse

Which creature did Isadore Klein first sketch as a costumed hero before his boss turned the idea into Mighty Mouse?

A fly was Klein's pick for a comic-book spoof in 1942. Studio head Paul Terry liked the idea but wanted a mouse, and the new hero reached theaters that October.

Which tech company licensed the Mighty Mouse name from the cartoon's owners for a computer mouse it launched in 2005?

Apple put the name on its first multi-button mouse. It gave the name up in 2009 after a trademark dispute with a firm that makes mice and keyboards for hospitals.

Which comedian lip-synced a single line of the Mighty Mouse theme song on the 1975 premiere of Saturday Night Live?

Andy Kaufman stood still while the record played, coming alive only for the hero's big line. The routine was recreated in the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon.

Which robot hero created by Osamu Tezuka has an original Japanese name inspired by Mighty Mouse?

Astro Boy is known in Japan as Mighty Atom, a name Tezuka said the cartoon mouse inspired. He also copied the hero's flying pose: one arm stretched ahead, fist clenched.

Which mustache-twirling cat in a top hat is Mighty Mouse's arch-enemy, having begun as a human villain in the 1930s?

Oil Can Harry first menaced a human heroine, Fanny Zilch, in seven Terrytoons melodrama spoofs from 1933 to 1937. He came back as a cat in 1947 to torment the mouse hero.

A 1987 Mighty Mouse cartoon was censored after activists claimed the hero sniffing a crushed flower depicted what?

Cocaine use was the charge a campaign group made in 1988. The show's producer called the claim lunacy, but cut the 3.5-second shot so that children would not wonder.

Which word did Mighty replace in Mighty Mouse's name in 1944, after a comic-book rival claimed the original?

Super Mouse was his name for seven cartoons from 1942. A comic-book Supermouse had debuted that same month in Coo Coo Comics, and Paul Terry renamed his hero rather than promote a rival's character.

Which TV network bought the Terrytoons studio in 1955 and turned Mighty Mouse into a Saturday morning star?

CBS repackaged the old theatrical shorts as Mighty Mouse Playhouse, which ran on Saturday mornings until 1967 and made the hero far more famous than his films ever had.

Which two colors make up Mighty Mouse's classic costume, adopted in 1944 after he gave up his original blue suit?

Yellow and red became his look in The Sultan's Birthday, his 15th cartoon. The redesign also gave him a barrel chest, with the cape and trunks in the darker shade.

Mighty Mouse was due to appear in a deleted funeral scene of which film that put cartoon stars beside live actors?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit planned the cameo for a cut scene called Acme's Funeral. The 1988 film arrived a year after the mouse's own TV comeback.

Which heroine does Mighty Mouse keep rescuing from a lovesick villain in his cliffhanger spoofs of the late 1940s?

Pearl Pureheart debuted in A Fight to the Finish in 1947 and came back for thirteen more melodramas, set everywhere from Holland to prehistoric times.

Which director of the X-rated film Fritz the Cat brought Mighty Mouse back to Saturday morning TV in 1987?

Ralph Bakshi, who began his career at Terrytoons in the 1950s, sold the revival by bluffing that he owned the rights. The network he pitched already owned them and had forgotten.

Which wisecracking Terrytoons duo, stars of their own cartoons since 1946, shared a 1979 TV series with Mighty Mouse?

Heckle and Jeckle, a pair of identical talking magpies, got two cartoons in every hour of the show. Their sadistic streak was toned down for 1970s children's television.

Which rival cartoon duo beat Mighty Mouse's only Oscar-nominated short, Gypsy Life, to the Academy Award for 1945?

Tom and Jerry won with Quiet Please! The nomination was still a rare honor for the low-budget Terrytoons studio, and only the third of Paul Terry's career.

John Kricfalusi, senior director on the 1987 Mighty Mouse revival, later created which gross-out Nickelodeon cartoon?

Ren & Stimpy were in fact pitched first: the network turned the cat and chihuahua down, then bought a mouse revival instead.

Elwy and the Tree Weasels, a band in the 1987 series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, spoofed which real cartoon group?

Alvin and the Chipmunks were one of many targets: the same series also sent up The Honeymooners, the 1960s Batman show and Japanese monster movies.

Mighty Mouse's first comic-book stories came in 1945 from Timely, the publisher that later grew into which company?

Marvel Comics came full circle in 1990, when it published a ten-issue series based on the mouse's 1987 TV revival.

In his 1942 debut, the future Mighty Mouse is an ordinary mouse who gains his powers inside what kind of building?

A supermarket supplies the magic: on the run from a cat, he washes with special soap, eats celery and dives into a giant cheese, then bursts out as a caped hero.

Beginning with Mighty Mouse and the Pirates in 1945, his cartoons told their stories in which musical stage style?

Operetta suited the hero's voice: Roy Halee was a radio tenor, and he and his quartet supplied all the vocals for the mock-heroic melodramas that followed.

Paul Terry, whose studio made Mighty Mouse, called Disney the Tiffany's of animation and likened himself to which chain?

Woolworth's, the five-and-dime chain, was his proud comparison. His studio was slow to adopt sound and color, but it stayed profitable while others went out of business.

Which studio, later famous for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, made Mighty Mouse's 1979 TV comeback series?

Filmation stepped in because the character's owners had long since closed their own cartoon studio. Its version toned down the violence and added a science-fiction serial.

Which Hollywood studio released Terrytoons' Mighty Mouse cartoons to movie theaters throughout the 1940s and 1950s?

20th Century Fox backed Terrytoons from the late 1930s and went on distributing its shorts even after the cartoon studio was sold to a television network in 1955.

In Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, the hero's secret identity is an ordinary mouse with what first name?

Mike Mouse was an invention of the 1987 revival, which also handed the hero a young sidekick who is in on the secret.

What is the name of the orphan sidekick given to Mighty Mouse in the 1987 series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures?

Scrappy was voiced by Dana Hill, who played Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation. In one cartoon he frets about the missing hero only because he is owed money.

In Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, what does the Batman spoof Bat-Bat call the walking car he drives?

The Man-Mobile turns the Batmobile inside out: a bat who dresses as Batman drives a car built to look like a person. His sidekick is Tick the Bug Wonder.

When the Mighty Heroes return, middle-aged, in a 1987 Mighty Mouse cartoon, what job do the former crimefighters hold?

Accountants at the firm of Man, Man, Man, Man and Man is what the five became. Even the baby of the team, Diaper Man, had grown up enough to sport a mustache.

Which voice actor, later He-Man's Skeletor, played both Mighty Mouse and his feline arch-enemy in the 1979 TV series?

Alan Oppenheimer also played the villain's henchman and the narrator, so the hero spent much of the series arguing with his own voice.

Which future Pixar director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E was hired as a young artist on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures?

Andrew Stanton was among several CalArts graduates recruited in a rush: the series went into production the same month the network approved it.

In 1953, St. John Publications used Mighty Mouse to launch the world's first example of which kind of publication?

A 3-D comic was a novelty in 1953: Three Dimension Comics #1 reportedly sold 1.2 million copies at 25 cents each, more than twice the usual cover price.

Mighty Mouse's powers varied with the story; which one does he display in the 1946 cartoon The Johnstown Flood?

Turning back time was one of several occasional extras. His core gifts were flight, great strength and invulnerability, but some cartoons threw in X-ray vision and psychokinesis.

Mighty Mouse's second cartoon, from 1942, spoofed Universal's horror films by pitting him against which monster's cat?

Frankenstein's Cat is jolted to life by a strike of lightning and menaces the mice until the hero arrives. A Jekyll and Hyde cat followed two years later.

In the 1982 film Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Chase, the Doomsday Device sought by the villain is a giant what?

A vacuum cleaner big enough to suck up everything in the galaxy is the prize. The film was stitched together from a 16-part serial in the hero's 1979 TV series.

The 1943 cartoon Pandora's Box rewrote the future Mighty Mouse's origin so that he gets his powers by eating what?

Vitamins, every one from A to Z, replaced the original origin story. In the same cartoon the hero battles demon cats with bat wings.

Which UFC flyweight champion, who made 11 straight title defenses, fought under the nickname Mighty Mouse?

Demetrious Johnson, who stands 5 ft 3 in, was the first flyweight champion the UFC ever crowned. He is also an avid gamer who streams under the name Mighty.

Mighty Mouse's melodrama spoofs of the late 1940s each open with the narrator urgently recapping what?

An invented earlier chapter set the scene, as if viewers had walked in halfway through a cliffhanger serial. The 1979 TV revival dropped the running joke.

The 1944 cartoon that first used the name Mighty Mouse was based on which poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?

The Wreck of the Hesperus got a heroic new ending: the mouse saves the captain, his daughter and the crew from a hurricane, then receives a ticker-tape parade.

Which 1940s Terrytoons star is found frozen in an iceberg in the 1987 series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures?

Gandy Goose thaws out lost without his old partner, the cat Sourpuss, and exhausts the hero with his antics until the pair are reunited.

What is the name of the fat but fast-running henchman cat introduced in Mighty Mouse's 1979 TV comeback series?

Swifty was a bumbling new sidekick for the hero's old enemy. In the 1982 spin-off film he is the villain's first mate, and presses the one pedal he was told to leave alone.

Marshall Barer, who wrote the Mighty Mouse theme song, had his greatest Broadway success with which 1959 musical?

Once Upon a Mattress, a comic retelling of The Princess and the Pea, made him a Broadway name. Even so, the cartoon tune remains his most-heard song.

In the 1987 series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, the hero's unhinged new nemesis is known simply as which animal?

The Cow tampers with a city's dairy food, wields a cosmic cheese and, in one cartoon, bails the mouse's classic enemy out of prison.