A Cold Romance (1949) User Reviews

Quite good for the series

[llltdesq · 7/10 · 12 September 2015]

This is a cartoon in the Mighty Mouse series produced by Terrytoons. There will be spoilers ahead:

This is a typical Mighty Mouse cartoon. It works because the details on the edges work fairly well.

Mighty Mouse is dueling with Oil-Can Harry and Harry's getting the worst of things. The narrator tells about a storm brewing outside, partly to set up a couple of sight gags and partly to set up a lightning bolt which pins Mighty Mouse to a tree, allowing Harry to escape and setting up the rest of the short.

Pearl Pureheart, called Nell here for reasons which will become obvious at the end of the cartoon, is flying to the South Pole to get seal skins for a new coat. Harry follows her by using just about every conveyance available for the environment-a whale as a taxi, a dog sled and a kayak. The gags here are fairly good.

Nell finds the seals and sings to them, offering to but their coats for fish. Harry catches up here and makes his intentions known. Nell hits him with a fish and runs, singing for Mighty Mouse to rescue her. Mighty Mouse breaks free, fights Harry while Nell goes through more peril, with some nice bits until the fight and dovetail together. The ending is as cute as it's predictable.

This short is worth watching.

Not that cold a romance

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 19 November 2021]

The operetta-like melodrama structured (already very old-fashioned in the 30s) Mighty Mouse cartoons are pleasant enough diversions, and to be seen for primarily the animation, music and supporting characters. They also tend to be far too formulaic, variable in writing and Mighty Mouse is underused and almost unnecessary in almost all of them. All these were common in a lot of the Mighty Mouse cartoons to have the operetta-like melodrama type of story.

Despite its flaws and being nothing special story-wise, one of the better Mighty Mouse cartoons to have this structure, and for me the best of the late 40s Mighty Mouse cartoons to be structured as an operetta-like melodrama, is this cartoon 'A Cold Romance'. It is not quite one of Terrytoons' best but is one of the better cartoons in the studio's 1949 batch, light years away from being one of the worst on both those counts and is worth tracking down for more than just completest sake. Whether one enjoys it though is dependent on what your thoughts on Mighty Mouse himself, am a bit take and leave with him personally.

'A Cold Romance' isn't perfect. The Mighty Mouse cartoons are not really to be seen for their stories, and certainly the more melodramatic ones. Once again the story is very samey and if you've seen one of the melodramatic cartoons in the series and then see a couple more you've pretty much seen them all, there is a sense to me that the writers were starting to struggle thinking of new ideas at this point and were recycling old ones.

Mighty Mouse's role is very one-note in many of his cartoons and his role is pretty much as you expect here, as it is pretty much similar to a vast majority of Mighty Mouse cartoons (a very formula-driven series). Some of the writing has a habit of over-explaining what is going on when it is not hard what is actually going on, it is great to have a storybook-like approach and the odd reminder but it was a bit overkill here.

Having said that, Mighty Mouse's resourcefulness and heroism here is admirable and he is not as underused or tacked on feeling. Little Nell, in the Pearl Pureheart-like role, and Oil Can Harry fare better as characters here though. Little Nell is alluring and charming, while also showing a feisty side to her. Oil Can Harry makes even more of an impression, he is so much fun to watch and has menace. The cartoon has more jeopardy than usual, one is really on the edge of their seat wondering as to whether the characters would survive their predicaments. It also has more gags than most of the operetta style Mighty Mouse cartoons and they are all amusing, especially in the final quarter.

What immediately stands out about 'A Cold Romance' is the music, in a very music-heavy cartoon it was important for that component to be nailed and it was. The animation is colourful and neat and it is great that the backgrounds increasingly became more ambitious and more detailed. Other than Oil Can Harry, the star though is the music. Like an essential character of its own and so infectious and cleverly constructed, some smile-inducing lyric writing too. It is well sung too.

Summarising, worth tracking down absolutely. 7/10.