BAD BILL BUNION (1945)
aka Mighty Mouse Meets Bad Bill Bunion
Article 5134 By Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-19-2016
Directed by Mannie Davis
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Mighty Mouse cartoon

Mighty Mouse goes out west to take on the desperado, Bad Bill Bunion, whose latest scheme is to kidnap a saloon singer named Belle.

As far as quality goes, I found this one to be a little below average for the series; most of the gags are pretty lame. The best one has the saloon singer warbling “Belle of the Golden West”, and then making bell sounds with her hoop skirt while swinging from a tree limb. That being said, I do have a few observations about this one. The first is that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent mythology for Mighty Mouse; here he lives in a skyscraper penthouse, is informed of his tasks through a TV set, and spends the entire cartoon interacting with human beings where he usually interacts with anthropomorphized cats and mice. This is also one of the non-operetta cartoons. Second, there seems to be some inconsistency with how his size is portrayed. When he enters the skyscraper, he looks roughly the size of an average human being, and when he first shares the frame with Big Bill Bunion, they look roughly the same size. However, when they get to one-on-one battling, he’s much smaller. One last detail is that there’s the possibility that I have the wrong cartoon; there’s a user comment on IMDB which describes a totally different cartoon, but since Bad Bill Bunion starts that one in prison, I suspect there was a sequel made. It is a bit of a shame I didn’t see that one, though; it has cameos of both Dracula and the Frankenstein monster.

NOTE I have since discovered that I did have the correct cartoon here.