"PANDORA'S BOX," MIGHTY MOUSE (1943)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I wasn't looking for mythicity when I watched a handful of MIGHTY MOUSE cartoons, since all of these products of the Terrytoons studio tend to be simple, unadorned formula. But perhaps as much by accident as design, the fourth cartoon in the series-- when the character was still called "Super Mouse" and had not yet been given his distinctive yellow attire-- succeeded in the myth department. It did so by tapping into one of the prominent myth-tales of ancient Greece, albeit filtered through the prism of a free-form animated cartoon.

The second Mighty Mouse short, "Frankenstein's Cat," spoofed the Mary Shelley story by focusing upon a monstrous feline, but "Pandora's Box" is more enterprising in reworking the major motifs of the Pandora myth. The original tale unfolds during the Golden Age, after the Titan Prometheus has gone against the will of supreme deity Zeus by bestowing the gift of fire on humankind. Zeus retaliates by creating a present for the Titan: the woman Pandora, whose name is interpreted variously as "all-giving" or "all-giver." Prometheus doesn't engage with Pandora, suspecting a trick, but his brother Epimetheus marries the woman. Going by Hesiod's sketchy account, Epimetheus' action gave Pandora access to a pithos (jar) which contained all possible evil things, and Pandora, whether moved by curiosity or by Zeus's orders, opens the jar and unleashes all those evil influences upon humankind, thus ending the Golden Age.

Writer John Foster opens "Pandora's Box" in a kid's version of the Golden Age: cloud-castles in the sky, a moon made of green cheese. The focal character initially seems to be Pandora, a girl mouse (and not one of the sexed-up female rodents one would see later in the series). Pandora lives alone but has everything a girl needs. All she has to do is pour some water on the ground outside her hut, and the ground yields trees that bear candy canes, lollipops and ice cream cones. Though this relates fairly well to the modern re-interpretation of Pandora as a goddess who dispenses both good and evil things, the candy-plants may be growing just because the earth is so munificent. But Pandora doesn't have a companion, so she makes a wish at the wishing-well, and a boy mouse, known only as "Pandora's playmate," pops into existence-- sort of a sex-reversal on Pandora being created by the gods rather than being born naturally.

But "time marches on" says the narrator, showing an aged man with a scythe, the then-standard image for a year coming to an end. Out of nowhere, the bloomer-clad "Witch Hazel" rides into view on a combination broom-and-hobbyhorse, and she drops a mysterious box directly into the house of Pandora. The box is marked "Do Not Open," so even though Pandora's playmate tells her not to, the curious girl can't help it, and opens the box. 

Out of the box spring three demon-cats, who begin raising Cain (oops, wrong mythos). The playmate yells at Pandora (now wearing lipstick for some reason) for her transgression, while the cats show their contempt for kids' priorities by destroying all the candy-plants. Then they move into the territory of thunder-god Zeus by unleashing bolts of lightning and torrents of rain upon the mouse community (which we haven't seen until now). 

Happily, there just happens to be some super-vitamins lying around, paralleling the "super-cheese" used by Super Mouse in the first cartoon. Pandora's playmate eats the vitamins and changes into Super-Mighty-Mouse. He then saves imperiled mice from a fire by letting them ride on his speed-trail, and quite easily beats up the bat-winged cats. One might expect the hero to shove the demons back into the box, but instead the Champion of Cheese-Eaters dumps them into the watery Big Dipper. 

Then, for a finale that essentially reverses the downturn expected of the Golden Age's end-- and maybe proves that "time does not march on" after all-- the hero slices off pieces of cheese from the moon for the delectation of the mice, and then canoodles a bit with Pandora as the cartoon closes.

"Pandora's Box" not only provided me with some strong mythopoeic images, it also led me to research its author. Though I'd never heard of John Foster before, he was both writing and directing cartoon shorts as far back as 1925. Foster's last directing credit was in 1938, but he kept writing for Terrytoons for over ten more years, and wrote almost all of the MIGHTY MOUSE shorts, though they had various directors. He passed in 1959, and may well deserve the lion's share of the credit for the sprightly adventures of the Mouse of Steel.