Eek! A Mouse!: Difference between revisions

A staple of early domestic comedies in both film and television. The mere sight of a mouse (or sometimes another animal who is the subject of [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?|a common phobia]]) will drive a housewife up onto a chair or a table, where she stands shrieking, stomping her feet, and clutching the hem of her skirt until the rodent is captured or driven away. This is largely a [[Dead Horse Trope]] today, rooted in a very specific and [[Double Standard|sexist image]] of women [[Values Dissonance|dating back to the early part of the 20th Century]], but it is still visible in old [[Looney Tunes]] cartoons and in the odd [[Screams Like a Little Girl|ironic reference]].

 

 

See also [[Cower Power]] and [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?]].

 

 

{{examples}}

== [[Advertising]] ==

* There was a commercial that had a woman do "EEK a Mouse!" bit and her husband hunts the mouse down but before he can dispatch it the wife see the mouse cornered and now it's a cute little mousey and she stops him. End of commercial has couple cuddling on the couch and mouse in a cage running on a wheel.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKLyHTcZqOs This] Samsung Infuse commercial, only with the image of a large spider.

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Freya from ''[[Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple]]'' is, among other things, a [[Badass]] [[Lady of War]] [[Action Girl]] [[Hot Amazon]] with [[Boobs of Steel]] and has apparently eschewed femininity. However, she still freaks out when she sees [[Sexy Mentor|Shigure's]] pet mouse.

* Used for a second in the last episode of ''[[Gakuen Alice]]'', where Hotaru uses a gang of robot mice to keep two [[Girly Girl]] classmates at bay.

* ''[[Kekkaishi]]'' had [[Lady of War|Tokine]] perform this trope, right after fighting a much bigger rodent ''that could breathe fire''. She and her grandmother also have a similarly disproportionate fear of cockroaches.

* In [[Ranma ½]]'s second movie, all the girls run away from a horde of mice. Ranma stands there unaffected and comments on how silly they are to be afraid of mice, until he discovers that cats are following said mice. [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?|At that point, he starts screaming in terror.]]

* In the ''[[Gundam Seed]]'' [[Visual Novel]] ''Tomo to Kimi to Senjou de'', Athrun decides to make a robot pet for his crush Cagalli. He ends up giving it a hamster design, but when she first sees it she has this reaction and smashes it. Kira steps in and explains, and Cagalli is both very touched by the gesture and very apologetic for destroying it.

* ''[[Inuyasha]]'': Kagome can handle [[Youkai]], blood, guts, wounds, two-timing boyfriends, time-travel, saving the world while trying to pass exams, lifting the spirits of the depressed, downtrodden and bullied and can even befriend the reclusive, the painfully shy, and aggressively hostile, but ask her to help a giant beast-faced [[Half-Human Hybrid|hanyou]] in his herb garden when there's an earthworm in plain sight and she'll fall to pieces.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* ''[[Tintin]]''. The Thomson twins are startled by mice used for experiments in "[[Tintin/Recap/Destination Moon|Destination Moon]]".

* This once happened in ''[[Archie]]'' when Ms. Grundy jumped on her desk and Jughead took a picture of it for the school newspaper. She actually was worried that the picture would be about how scared she was of a little mouse but instead it turned out to be proof the school needed an exterminator.

* The protagonist of ''Jennifer Blood'' takes advantage of this stereotype in issue 3, when a neighbor who's convinced she's attracted to him has cornered her in a bathroom and exposed himself to her. She doesn't want to ruin her "perfectly ordinary suburban housewife" facade by maiming or killing him, but as someone who moonlights as a brutal [[Vigilante]], that's all she's trained to do. So she starts shrieking about a pretend mouse.

 

* The main plot of the ''[[Calvin at Camp]]'' episode "Bringing Down the Mouse."

 

== [[Film]] ==

* There is a great scene in ''Conan the Destroyer'' where Grace Jones' character, who up until now has been afraid of nothing, taking on whole villages and men much larger than her in combat fearlessly, jumps and screams at the sight of a mouse. When all of her party look back she looks sheepish.

* The 1959 movie ''[[The Mouse That Roared]]'' opens with the Columbia Studios girl-with-torch logo suddenly hiking up her gown and fleeing from a mouse at her feet. (The title is a metaphor for a tiny, innocuous nation that ends up holding the fate of the world in its hands.)

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* In one of the ''Clue'' mystery books, Mr. Boddy reveals that several white mice have escaped. The first one to actually do this trope is the duel-crazy Colonel Mustard, but the other guests don't laugh because they're doing the same thing.

* Happens in a ''[[Doctor Dolittle]]'' story: A smaller African kingdom is warred upon by a bigger, expansionist one, whose crack troops are Amazons. The White Mouse who lives in Doolittle's pocket points out that while they are fearsome warriors, the Amazons [[Values Dissonance|are still women]], and gather a force of local mice who scares them away.

* Played with and justified in the last Hawk & Fisher story, where a crime lord keeps a bunch of naked Amazons as bodyguards. Rather than fight them, Hawk and Fisher turn a sackful of ravenous sewer rats loose in the crime lord's lair, and the bodyguards start climbing the furniture in a panic when the starving rodents swarm them to bite their bare toes.

* In ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'', Arthur Dent associates mice with cheese and women standing screaming on tables in early Sixties [[Sitcom|Sit Coms]].

 

* The ''[[Three's Company]]'' episode "The Best Laid Plans" revolved a mouse being loose in the trio's apartment, with Janet being the mouseophobic one.

** Spinoff the [[The Ropers]] featured a gender-flipped version of this trope: it was ''Mr.'' Brooks, not his wife, who leaped up onto the couch screaming at the sight of a white mouse—safely in a cage, no less.

* Averted in the premiere episode of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''. The heroine doesn't even twitch when a sewer rat runs over her foot.

 

* ''A Challenge of Arms'' had a ''mastodon'' that was afraid of mice.

 

** And hence why stage 2 of the final battle has Link having to take down the ghost mice used to attack Zelda by Chancellor Cole.

* Played with in ''[[Galaxy Angel (video game)|Galaxy Angel]]'', where in an [[Amazon Brigade]] full of girly-girls, the one with the paralyzing phobia of mice is the [[Mighty Glacier|powerful]] and [[Boobs of Steel|intimidating]], [[Rare Guns|Rare Gun]]-collecting, ultra-violent [[Bifauxnen]] Forte.

* ''[[Dragon Quest VIII]]'' has [[Prince Charmless|Prince Charmles]] who [[Dirty Coward|refuses to undergo the hunt for an Argonian Lizard]] to prove he's worthy of the throne because he's afraid of lizards. All lizards. Even little ones. You have to scare him out of a room he's holed himself up in at one point by nudging a lizard into it, provoking this trope as a reaction to it.

* [[Comix Zone|Mongoria]], an otherwise extremely formidable enemy, had this as her weakness.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* Referenced in ''[[South Park]]'' episode "Eek, A Penis!" where a mouse frightened women with a genetically engineered human penis growing on its back.

** Actually they were frightened by the penis. But the trope still stands.

* When Captain Fanzone winds up on Cybertron in ''[[Transformers Animated]]'', this is basically the Transformers' response.

* In the silent ''[[Krazy Kat]]'' cartoon "Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus", Ignatz [[Genre Savvy|knowingly employs this trope]] this to scare a woman in the circus dressing room. When Krazy tries it himself, he gets hit with a broom.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* While elephants don't typically leap onto small objects at the sight of a mouse, research has provided a possible reason for the elephant's fear of mice: an elephant's eyes are located on its head in approximately the same position as a human's ears—add this to the elephant's large body, (relatively) poor eyesight, and sensitive hearing, and what the elephant sees turns from a small, furry rodent into a small, barely-visible, blurry and mostly-unidentifiable squeaking blob somewhere near its feet.

** If a mouse is ''brought close and shown'' to an elephant, however, it's generally not alarmed in the slightest, and may even lift the rodent in its trunk for a better view. The reality may be that elephants are wary of '''any''' small moving critter on the ground, just in case it turns out to be something a lot nastier than a mouse (e.g. a scorpion or coiled-up cobra).

* Semi real-life, with another type of vermin rather than a mouse: The late [[X Japan]] guitarist hide and the drummer/bandleader Yoshiki were/are both terrified of cockroaches. One story has it that when the band members were in Los Angeles for the first time, a roach had gotten into the room hide and Yoshiki shared. This trope ensued with both, according to the story, jumping up onto the bed and shrieking until it was finally agreed that ''someone'' had to kill the roach, and depending on who's telling the story, either Hide or Yoshiki finally did.

* Psychologists who studied the Eek! a Mouse! phenomenon concluded that it's not the mouse itself which the typical distressed housewife is afraid of, but her awareness that she'll probably have to ''kill'' the animal to remove it from her residence. The mouse is harmless, killing is Squicky.

** Besides, as humans have co-evolved with mice ever since the dawn of agriculture, screaming, shouting and stamping if a mouse enters your kitchen is a moderately sound response- perfectly sensible for a woman to aggressively protect her food-store by trying to frighten away small invaders.

* In the nonfiction book ''Retail Hell: How I sold my soul to the store'', this happened in the "Big Fancy" store when someone returned a product to the handbag department that had a ''huge'' Cockroach in it. Naturally; this trope ensues and Freeman is told to kill it as the ''sole'' male working the department.

* In [[Real Life]], there's very good reason to be afraid of mice. House mice in particular [[wikipedia:House mouse#Mice and humans|can carry deadly diseases]] and there have been reports of ones growing so large they attack albatross chicks nearly one meter tall. In addition, in 1993, Australia was beset by one of the most devastating mouse plagues in the world; mice began eating the '''livestock''' alive.

[[Category:Rodent Tropes]]

[[Category:Discredited Trope]]

[[Category:Tropes Examined by the Mythbusters]]