The Great Mouse Detective

[osprey_archer]

Confession time: I’ve tried to watch The Great Mouse Detective twice before, and both times I fell asleep. In both cases I was watching the movie after driving somewhere or other, but still.

However, this time I remained awake all the way through! It’s a cute movie, but as you might imagine from the above confession, it is not destined to become a new favorite. In general, I just don’t seem to love Sherlock Holmes adaptations quite as much as everyone else seems to (there was an adaptation I briefly got excited about because I thought it was f/f, but then I realized the Jamie character was a boy Jamie and lost interest), and that of course is the whole point of The Great Mouse Detective.

Also, let’s be real: in the world of Villains Disguising Themselves As Rodents, Warren T. Cat from An American Tail (a cat disguised as a rat) beats Professor Ratigan (a rat disguised as a mouse) all hollow. The movies came out the same year, too! Was there just something in the water?

Comments

[sovay]

It’s a cute movie, but as you might imagine from the above confession, it is not destined to become a new favorite.

I am extremely fond of The Great Mouse Detective, partly because I find it charming and batshit (REPLACE THE MOUSE EQUIVALENT OF QUEEN VICTORIA WITH A STEAMPUNK ROBOT DOUBLE OF HERSELF SURE WHY NOT DID WE MENTION THE BURLESQUE NUMBER) and partly because while I did not see it in theaters the first time around, I did manage to see it within a year or so of its release and then it fell off the cultural map so fast that I could not persuade anyone I met that it was a real movie and not just some kind of personalized headcanon or misunderstanding of Eve Titus' Basil of Baker Street (1958) and then a few years later it was re-released theatrically and undeniably existed and I felt so smug.

[troisoiseaux]

I could not persuade anyone I met that it was a real movie and not just some kind of personalized headcanon or misunderstanding of Eve Titus' Basil of Baker Street (1958)

I had the exact opposite experience, actually! I read Basil of Baker Street in 2nd grade and then spent years convinced I'd somehow made up the experience of reading the book based off of seeing the movie.

[sovay]

I read Basil of Baker Street in 2nd grade and then spent years convinced I'd somehow made up the experience of reading the book based off of seeing the movie.

That's brilliant. Now I'm waiting for a third person to turn up in comments and say, "Wait, those were both real?"

(I can't remember if I read Basil of Baker Street before or after seeing The Great Mouse Detective. I associate the former with the tiny branch library that is now a community TV studio and the latter with summer day camp, where I saw most of the Disney movies of my childhood.)

[troisoiseaux]

I can't remember if I read Basil of Baker Street before or after seeing The Great Mouse Detective

I'm pretty sure the order, for me, was 1. seeing the Rattigan song scene on one of those Disney sing-along video tapes that were just compilations of the musical scenes from Disney movies, 2. reading Basil of Baker Street, and 3. watching The Great Mouse Detective sometime after I'd gotten into the actual Sherlock Holmes stories (so... 4th grade, maybe?)

[osprey_archer]

To be fair, "replace the mouse equivalent of Queen Victoria with a steampunk robot double" sounds like exactly the sort of movie plot one might come up with in a fever dream, so I can see where the disbelievers were coming from. "Disney couldn't have really made a movie like that!" I imagine them scoffing, only to realize years later that Disney truly has no limits. Disney is bonkers! Just look at the dream sequence in Dumbo.

[troisoiseaux]

The movies came out the same year, too! Was there just something in the water?

There are so many children's movies/books with mice as the heroes and/or rats as the villains (or at least the antagonists.)

[osprey_archer]

Maybe it's the Mickey Mouse effect. Given how most people feel about actual mice, I wouldn't put them at the top of my Most Likely to Be a Cartoon Hero list.

[troisoiseaux]

My theory is that mice make great underdogs, and underdog heroes really appeal to kids? I was thinking more of books than cartoons— The Tale of Despereaux and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH were some of my favorites growing up.

[teenybuffalo]

Man oh man, I love this movie so much! After first hating and fearing it. I remember wandering into a screening, when I was a highly sensitive child, and arriving at the moment when Professor Ratigan demonstrates his evil plan with a child-appropriate doll of Mouse Queen Victoria as a prop to stand in for the eventual full-sized doll replacement, and then his eyes bulge with hatred and he bares every tooth in his head and squeezes the doll in his fist till its head pops off. I was so frightened by this that I ran screaming.

Fast-forward to adulthood, and I watched it because Vincent Price was in it and wound up loving the whole thing. And I usually hate Sherlock Homes riffs! This didn't ever try to convince me it was a legit adaptation, though, which is probably why I'm OK with it. (I read somewhere once that it was Vincent Price's favorite of his own performances, which makes me happy too.)

[sovay]

(I read somewhere once that it was Vincent Price's favorite of his own performances, which makes me happy too.)

My introduction to Vincent Price was either this movie or the time he sang "You've Got a Friend" with some monsters on The Muppet Show. I regret neither way.

[teenybuffalo]

And being bitten in the neck by Kermit the Frog!

[osprey_archer]

Disney movies are SO scary for small children. The grasping trees in Snow White! The whale in Pinocchio! The entire Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia! Clearly a tradition that continued at least up through The Great Mouse Detective.

[evelyn_b]

The Great Mouse Detective was an early and forever favorite in my family (almost certainly the first Sherlock Holmes adaptation I ever encountered, unless Sesame Street did something Sherlockian I don't remember) and Ratigan, the World's Greatest Impressively Big-Boned Mouse, was one of the great characters of my childhood.

I know I also saw An American Tail, but have no memory of it except that the little mouse's hat was too big for him. I'm impressed to learn that it also featured a Very Convincing Rodent Identity.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that The Great Mouse Detective would have had more of effect if I saw it at the appropriate age, because I was ALL about anthropomorphic mice when I was four, but unfortunately I didn't see it till after college, by which point it was Too Late.