Mouse Musicale

There’s a cartoon where a mouse heckles a piano player. Tom and Jerry, you say? Bugs Bunny, you say? No. Some 17 years before The Cat Concerto and 16 years before Rhapsody Rabbit, the Fleischers came out with the Screen Song Come Take a Trip on My Airship.

The title has really nothing to do with the plot of the cartoon, which involves an anonymous female cat having a piano delivered to her apartment. Kitty is playing away when a mouse jumps onto the top of the piano and starts hitting the keys.



The cat is not happy and swats the mouse off the keys. Unfortunately, the keyboard goes flying, too.



The mouse is not dismayed. It continues to play the keys like a xylophone until kicked out of the picture.



Here’s a great in-between. The piano re-grows a face and pulls the cat back toward it.



Earlier in the short, the cat and the piano hugged and kissed each other.

I have no idea what company decided to black out the original lettering of the song lyrics, but the substituted ones with upper and lower case that stand still while the film behind them moves slightly are a little disconcerting.

The song, by the way, goes back to 1904 and was sung on a recording back then by Billy Murray, who was later heard in Fleischer cartoons.