Like, say, rats and hamsters?
Needless to say, rats are also cute. Possibly even cuter than mice.
(Plus, their fur is pleasant to stroke.)
(Emphasis added to the quote, of course.)
“Startled by” might have been a better way to express it than “frightened of”. Mice are inconspicuous until they move, and then they move fast. You don’t notice them, then there’s a blur of hard-to-identify movement. The part of our brain in charge of ohcrap reactions isn’t very good at distinguishing “harmless fast-moving mammal that’s trying to escape” from “bitey venomous reptile that’s striking”. That’s enough to make most people jump a bit, even if they aren’t actually afraid.
Of course, then there’s Mean Old Lady… 
I think it comes down to this: most of us in modern America are VERY far removed from life on the farm or the frontier. So far removed that all kinds of things that seemed natural and uncontroversial to our rural ancestors seem unspeakably horrible today. To our ancestors, mice and rabbits were thieving varmints who theatened the crops. Hence, Great Grandpa didn’t think twice about shooting rabbits he found on his property, and was HAPPY when his cat killed mice.
It’s only when we’re fat, happy and living in a nice clean suburban house that we have the luxury of looking at widdle mousies and bunny wabbits and thinking, “Awwww… how cute!”
A friend who visited relatives on their station (ranch) in Australia told me that he and his kids were thrilled to see kangaroos hopping around outside. But when they pointed the critters out to their uncle, who owned the spread, he immediately snarled, “Bloody 'ell, where’s my gun?”
Same principle. The farther you get from the farm, the easier it is to find pests adorable.
Was Mickey the first popularized cartoon mouse? And if so is it simply that everyone after followed that lead?
I think so, MacTech, but this time you put the trousers on the chimp.
I’m not sure that’s significant - he was pretty close to the first popularized cartoon anything. Animation was still a pretty new thing when he was invented.
Rats and Mice don’t usually live in the same structure. Back when people and their lifestock all lived together in the winter Rats were a much bigger threat. So when you saw Mice you knew you didn’t have rats. Lesser of two evils.
I had a manager once who noticed that I was very good at making the “store closing” announcements over the intercom. He came back to my department so many times that one night he came back and asked “do you know what I’m going to ask you?”
I replied “yes, but continue to ask me that question any way.”
So, night after night, he would come back and ask “do you know what I’m going to ask you?”
“I think so, but what will we do when she wakes up?”
“I think so, but that’s not legal in this state.”
“I think so. Shame on you.”
“I think so, and it’s been an honor serving you. See you in hell.”
“I think so, but Renee [incompetent store manager] will kill us!”
George Orwell, in a trench during the Spanish Civil War, noticed that this old adage was not true when sufficient food was available for both types of animal.
Well, I won’t say she STARTED the trend, but Beatrix Potter made bunny wabbits and mousies very popular with kids decades before Disney did, in stories like Peter Rabbit, ***Two Bad Mice , Benjamin Bunny *** and Mrs. Tittlemouse.
And Kenneth Grahame’s ***The Wind in the Willows ***had a rat as its hero in 1908.
Not sure if that’s significant. So he invented lots of the tropes because he was first, e eryone else is still doing it because they repeat what they see the public accepts and likes. The Mouse worked. The public accepted the mouse as the hero. Once that is out there in the public’s sense of the cartoon world are you going to be the new cartoonist making mice as bad guys?
If Disney had first brought a cute cockroach successfully as the big animation star (say a take-off on Archy) we’d be seeing multiple decades of cute cockroaches too.
Indeed. And to the point, the Potter creations actually looked like the animals (albet, wearing clothes). Mickey is of course very stylized.
Homer: Which one's the mouse?
Bart: Itchy.
Homer: Itchy’s a jerk.
Bart: Yeah.
And, of course, Aesop wrote “The Lion and the Mouse” some time around 500 BC.
The “funny animal” genre was established in comics before animation, and it included mice…but not necessarily in sympathetic roles. Krazy Kat, which dates back to 1913, features Ignatz Mouse. The comic appeared in animated form in 1916, more than a decade before Mickey was created. Ignatz, however, is an aggressive antagonist who goes to great lengths to bean Kat–who, contrary to typical cat-mouse relationships, does not try to eat or otherwise harm the mouse–with bricks.
Of course, funny animals are a long tradition. One fabled mouse was depicted as far back as the Middle Kingdom period of Egypt (~2050 BC - 1650 BC), in the story of the Mouse Who Became Vizier. Again, he was not the most sympathetic of talking mice, as he was a hotheaded judge and was eventually punished for his rulings. The earliest sympathetic mouse character I can think of is the mouse in Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Mouse, which puts it back to at least the 600 - 500 BC period, and which fits the clever underdog character type.
How many specifically mouse-related tropes did Mickey Mouse pioneer, though? If you think “cartoon mouse,” you generally think of perfect little arch-topped mouseholes, an obsession with cheese, and a perennial conflict with a cat. There’s none of the first two in Mickey Mouse, so far as I’m aware, and while Mickey’s most common antagonist was Pete, who was apparently a cat of some sort, the conflict isn’t so much “cat and mouse” in nature, as “big jerk and plucky little guy.” It’s more Popeye and Bluto than Tom and Jerry.
Good points Balance and Miller.
We wouldn’t even have Mickey is Disney had been able to keep Oswald. In any case, pretty much from the beginning, Mickey was more man than animal.
Until I had to give them away when I moved into a house with cats, I had pet mice. Given time and patience, fancy mice can be perfectly handleable and trainable, especially if you start when they’re young.
They do seem to have gone out of fashion in recent years, but they used to be very common as schoolboys’ pets, and pop up very often in classic kids’ books. Rats seem to have taken over now.
I had two pet mice as a kid - that the shop had carefully sexed and matched so I would only ever have two. Then I caught a brown field mouse and put it in the same cage…:smack: