Norman McCabe | The Impatient Patient / 1942 || Mannie Davis | Mighty Mouse Meets Jekyll and Cat Hyde / 1944 || Joseph Barbara and William Hanna | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse / 1947 || Friz Freleng | Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide / 1954 || Friz Freleng |Hyde and Hare / 1955 || Friz Freleng | Hyde and Go Tweet / 1959 || Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble | Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? / 1964

seven cartoon jekylls in seven-minute waltzes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Christensen (writer), Norman McCabe (director) The Impatient Patient / 1942

John Foster and Tom Morrison (writers), Mannie Davis (director) Mighty Mouse Meets Jekyll and Cat Hyde / 1944

Joseph Barbara and William Hanna (writers and directors) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse / 1947

Warren Foster (writer), Friz Freleng (director) Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide / 1954

Warren Foster (writer), Friz Freleng (director) Hyde and Hare / 1955

Warren Foster (writer), Friz Freleng (director) Hyde and Go Tweet / 1959

Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones (writers), Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble (directors) Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? / 1964

 

From 1942 to 1964 filmmakers from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Brothers delivered up seven animated cartoons based on the Robert Louis Stevenson Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. With Daffy Duck, Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Sylvester and Alfie, Bugs Bunny, and Sylvester and Tweety as their central characters, the films included The Impatient Patient (1942), Mighty Mouse Meets Jekyll and Cat Hyde (1944), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1947), Dr. Jerkyll’s Hide (1954), Hyde and Hare (1955), Hyde and Go Tweet (1960), and Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? (1964).

     Most of these are simply written in response to the notion of the creator and his inner monster, a different kind of Frankenstein in which a potion is involved. In the Mighty Mouse cartoon, the only real connection with Stevenson’s tale is that the mice find their way to escape a storm into the old, abandoned Jekyll house wherein sleeps Jekyll’s hungry cat who turns into a kind of monstrous Hyde to attack the intruders.

    In general, these works involved simply the discovery or creation of a potion which radically changed the size and destructive capabilities of the mouse, cat, bird, or rabbit, who intimidated his usual enemy, yet in the constant transformations back and forth to normality altered both torturer and tortured.

     Arguably Tom the cat and Alfie the bulldog suffered the worst for these Hulk-like transformations. In Hyde and Go Tweet Sylvester is more frightened and intimidated by the size and appearance of a giant yellow bird than actually beaten up in the process. But in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse Tom falls to pieces and basically goes hungry, as he does in Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? when Jerry whips up his own formula for turning himself into a kind of “Mighty Mouse” as he spins around the house consuming everything in sight. His motions are so sped up that Tom cannot even visually perceive them and is forced to film the mouse’s consumption of a chocolate cake and watch it slow motion in order to prove his suspicions that the menace is his old friend and not some new imported villain. 

     Although it is hard to feel sorry for the bulldog Alfie who not only chases after Sylvester but bullies his best buddy Chester, in this case, after getting battered not only by Sylvester and a pesky mosquito who sips on some of Dr. Jerkyll’s serum, one can only have a little pity for the Cockney-speaking bulldog. One might argue that this 1954 cartoon is one of the earliest tales about the besting of homophobic bullies, since it’s clear that Chester is a loving slave to his macho friend. And, at least, this cartoon insinuates by the sign hanging in the doorway and Dr. Jerkyl resides inside—a subliminal message to children that the two men live together without bothering to explain they exist in one body.

      In the earliest of this group, The Impatient Patient Daffy Duck, a Western Union telegraph deliverer, finds his way Dr. Jerkyl’s lair in the Ookaboochie swampland where’s he arrived to deliver a message to a Chloe. He visits the doctor to cure his hiccups, and in his attempts to scare the hiccups away, Jerkyl takes the serum becoming a gigantic woman who simply wants to dance the night away with Daffy. Exhausted by her chases after him, Daffy quickly concocts is own serum which turns Chloe into a baby, the likes of Baby Snookums, dangerous in a different way. But this time Daffy’s prepared, knocking the sense out of the stroller-bound child with a huge mallet, with a cuckoo-clock announcing, “He dood it.” At least director Norman McCabe imagined Hyde as something out of the normal, and even a bit queer in the fact that a powerful female figure has evidently been transformed out of the nerdy Dr. Jerkyl’s body.

     With the exception of Hyde and Hare, however, the others represent simply further opportunities for Jerry to get the better of his conniving frenemy Tom and little Tweety to outwit the dimwitted Sylvester. The relationship with Stevenson lies only in the laboratory-concocted potion and the unpredictable limits of its alternating transformations.

       Three of these works, Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide, Hyde and Hare, and Hyde and Go Tweet were created by the same team of Friz Freleng and Warren Foster, yet their Bugs Bunny work could not be more different from the other two. In Hyde and Hare Foster and Freleng appear to actually comprehend the queer implications of Stevenson’s original, as they present a gentle, soft spoken, smallish man in the park who regularly brings carrots to feed to Bugs. Tired of playing the game of the timid rabbit, Bugs, jumping into his lap, suggests that he adopt him, which the gentle Dr. is most happy to do, quickly taking him into his home where Bugs immediately likes the look of the comfortable surroundings, settling down at the piano, topped with a candelabra, to play Chopin’s Minute Waltz as he quips, with a slight lisp—almost in a gay coded lingo—“I wish my brother George was here.” The reference, presumably, is to the kitsch queer piano performer Liberace, who often spoke of his brother George.

      Meanwhile, the gentle doctor, attempting to find a carrot in his laboratory attempts to resist a glass of the formula sitting on the countertop, but, unable to keep his resolve, returns to drink it up, observing in his quiet, reserved, slightly fey voice, “Oh I am so ashamed.” Quickly becoming a larger green colored figure in his now ill-fitting suit he presents himself to Bugs, not presumably as in the other cartoons to chase, beat him, or put his tale in a waffle iron, but to sexually attack him, perhaps murdering him in the process; and for one of the first times Bugs really does seem to be terrified, running off as he calls for the Doctor, suggesting that the man holding an axe in his hand behind him, is a “mental case” in need of a cure. This is not quite the usual Bugs who seems to have a solution for every situation.

       A moment or two later he encounters the gentle doctor, who, startled to find an axe in his hand, tosses it away in his thin reedy voice (read gay effeminate) reacts, “Oh dear, I hope I didn’t hurt someone.” Bugs tells him about the monster, handing him back the axe to help him protect himself.

      When it happens again, Bugs finds the Doc, and to protect him drags him into the storage room, handing him a gun as he boards up the door. The Doctor comments, “I wish he hadn’t given me this,” before turning back into the monster shoots a hole in the door through Bugs’ ears.

       As Bugs runs off to hide in another closet, he again encounters the Doctor who he invites to share the closet, but once within realizes the monster has returned. Escaping yet again, Bugs runs off to the laboratory, while the Doctor leaving the closet worries “Oh my, I hope I didn’t frighten my bunny away.”

      With its references to the monster in the closet he shares with a good friend, the cartoonists clearly must have recognized the full implications of their queer fable.

      When the cartoon figures encounter one another again in the laboratory, Bugs argues that he’s leaving since the monster seems to appear everywhere. The Doctor, pleading with him, assures him, “If you stay, I can assure you, you’ll never be bothered by him again.”—Jekyll’s assurance in the 1931 film to Ivy, Hyde’s distraught mistress. “I’m going to pour the whole formula down the drain.” Finding the glass and beaker empty, the Doc asks, “Did you drink this?”

      Insulted, so he proclaims, Bugs ends their friendship, vowing to return back to the park where there is no question of his integrity. By the time he reaches his former haunts, he has turned green, scaring away all the elderly women feeding the pigeons, Bugs wondering “What’s up with them? You’d think they’d never seen a rabbit before.”

      Here is another obviously coded movie of the 1950s. It’s interesting, in hindsight, how Bugs Bunny, through his rabbit species the symbol of sexuality and fertility, is the cartoon figure who most often was chosen to encapsulate gay themes.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2021

Los Angeles, December 9, 2021