It's Got Me Again!

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It's Got Me Again! (1932)
Directed by Rudolf Ising
Produced by Hugh Harman
Rudolf Ising
Leon Schlesinger
Starring Johnny Murray
The Rhythmettes (uncredited) [1]
Music by Frank Marsales
Animation by Isadore Freleng
Thomas McKimson
Color process Black and White
Production
company
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
The Vitaphone Corporation
Release date
  • May 14, 1932 (1932-05-14)
Running time
7 min (one reel)
LanguageEnglish

It's Got Me Again! is a 1932 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short film directed by Rudolf Ising. [2] The short was released on May 14, 1932. [3]

Contents

It is noted as the first cartoon from Warner Bros. to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1932. [4] The title refers to the song "It's Got Me Again!" (music by Bernice Petkere, lyrics by Irving Caesar) which plays during the cartoon.

Plot

One night, a Mickey Mouse-like mouse crawls out of a mouse hole and attempts to sneak out only to be scared back by a grandfather clock's chimes and gets its tail stuck in a mousetrap. After escaping the trap via entering its hole, the mouse exits the hole, grabs and eats the cheese on the mousetrap and continues trekking onwards. After going through multiple musical instruments, the mouse bounces on a drum and activates a gramophone, which plays the titular song. This causes the mouse to tell his mouse friends to come out and dance to the tune, which they promptly do. Some mice even run on the disc being played only to be launched off. One of the mice launched bounces off of a horn and slides through a flute, creating multiple smaller versions of itself, which starts to play Yankee Doodle alongside its fellow mice. During this, a few mice march across the ceiling (with animation reused from Hold Anything), with one off-sync and even falling off of the ceiling and into a spittoon after the song ends. The mice mock the off-sync mouse who retaliates by blowing a raspberry through a trombone, creating a loud noise and stopping the mocking mice. The mouse then waltzes off whistling Yankee Doodle, all the while a hungry cat watches on.

The mouse waltzes to a piano where two mice are shown doing a variation of the Apache dance on it. During this, the hungry cat climbs to the rooftop and watches from above before diving through the chimney. After landing in the fireplace, the cat notices a cuckoo clock before diving towards it and eating it, which causes the cat to hiccup cuckoo noises. As it sneaks up on the mice, the cuckoo noises alert the mice to the cat's presence, causing all but one mouse to escape. This mouse is chased all around the house until he's cornered. This results in him begging the cat to let him go through singing a variation of the title song. However, seeing as the cat won't let him go, the mouse's friends launch a drum stick at the cat using a guitar's bow as a bow and arrow.

This causes the cat to flee as the rest of the mice attack the cat with other instruments-turned-weapons, such as a harp launching more drum sticks, mice using a flamethrower to burn the cat and cause him to be knocked out by a drum, a mouse tickling the cat with a noisemaker, and ending the cat off by firing needles from the gramophone as if a machine gun, resulting in the cat fleeing through the window as the mice cheer.

Title song

Throughout the cartoon, the song "It's Got Me Again!" by Bernice Petkere plays. While the original song is played at the start, most of lyrics don't seem to be intelligible outside of the name of the song and certain other words and no other records of the song before or after the cartoon exist. The song is, however, among the songs played in Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past, although no lyrics are sung.

Home media

It's Got Me Again! is available as a bonus feature on disc 2 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3.

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References

  1. ↑ Scott, Keith (2022). Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, 1930-70. BearManor Media. p. 8. ISBN   979-8-88771-010-5.
  2. ↑ Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 11. ISBN   0-8050-0894-2.
  3. ↑ Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 104–106. ISBN   0-8160-3831-7 . Retrieved June 6, 2020.
  4. ↑ "The 5th Academy Awards (1932) Nominees and Winners". Oscars.org (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). Archived from the original on May 7, 2016. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
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