Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/The Hypochondricat
From Eccentric Flower
The Hypo-Chondri-Cat
1949
Summary: Hubie and Bertie convince Claude the cat that they can cure all his imagined maladies.
Director: Chuck Jones
Writer: Michael Maltese
Featuring: No regulars.
Onreel
0:18 Sound cue: "Blues In the Night."
0:34 Sound cue: "September In the Rain."
1:07 Sound cue: "Home Sweet Home."
2:50 Sound cue: "The Campbells Are Coming" (when the cat turns plaid).
3:25 Sound cue in the "operation" sequence: "Melancholy Mood." Vintage recording with vocals.
4:10 Forceps are a surgical tool, but biceps are muscles in your arms.
4:38 Those are classic doctor's bags that the cat is running around in.
4:55 The implication here is that the cat's angel robe is actually a flour sack. Flour came in cloth sacks once upon a time.
5:03 I am unable to identify if this is a specific musical cue, under this sequence ...
6:17 ... but about here, it definitely becomes "A Little On the Lonely Side." Version with (eventual) vocals.
6:51 As the cat realizes he is actually aloft, the sound cue turns into "Aloha Oe."
Offreel
Hubie and Bertie
Hubie and Bertie are some of Jones' first efforts (their first cartoon appeared in 1943) to actually be funny instead of cute. They are sort of a mixed bag, although one thing I find nice about them is that the cartoons where they appear are usually not afraid to be morbid/gruesome, as in this cartoon where they deceive a cat into thinking he has died during surgery! (My sense of humor tends toward the dark.)
Jones used the same mouse model sheets in several other cartoons, but for the genuine Hubie and Bertie cartoons, they refer to each other by name, and Claude the cat is often their victim (or one of their victims). A case could be made for the Sylvester/Porky cartoons such as Scaredy Cat, where Sylvester sees a threat from the mice but can't make Porky aware of it. Those mice are never identified (in fact I'm not sure they ever speak), but their behavior - and the gruesomeness level of the cartoon - is definitely typical of Hubie and Bertie.
For a list of the seven canonical Hubie and Bertie cartoons, see the Lost and Found. That page also contains a list of the three Sylvester "evil mice" cartoons.
