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Eek! A Mouse!: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Mice to me mean the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing screaming on tables in early Sixties sitcoms..."''|'''Arthur Dent''', ''[[The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]''}}
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]].
[[Looney Tunes]] cartoons will sometimes [[Playing With a Trope|play with this trope]] by crossing it with the old myth (recently deemed plausible by the [[Myth Busters]]) about mice frightening elephants, resulting in elephants that shriek and leap up onto some (possibly insufficiently-strong) object upon sighting a mouse.
See also [[Cower Power]] and [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?]].
Not to be confused with ''[[Eek the Cat]].'' Also not to be confused with the Jamaican reggae artist "Eek-A-Mouse".
{{examples
== [[Advertising]] ==
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* In ''[[Saber Marionette J (Anime)|Saber Marionette J]]'', in order to make the marionette robots as much like (stereotypical) women as possible, every one of them is programmed to be afraid of mice -- except the tomboyish Lime, who merely finds them cute.
* ''[[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 One Half|Ranma 1/2]]'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
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* ''[[Tintin (Comic Book)]]''. The Thomson twins are startled by mice used for experiments in "[[Tintin (Comic Book)/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.
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** Including a short where the "Eeker" was Tom's cowardly identical cousin.
** The Elephant variation is averted in one episode where Jerry befriends a baby elephant, then disguises it as a giant mouse.
*** Also defied in a [[Chuck Jones]] short where it gets overridden by [[Androcles' Lion]].
* Several old ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' shorts utilize this trope.
** In one short, a mouse mocks the way the housewife panics.
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* Subverted in ''[[The Simpsons]]'' at Apu's wedding. When a mouse runs out in the the elephant's path, the elephant recoils for a moment... and then proceeds to deliberately step on it.
* Taken to ridiculous lengths in an episode of [[The Powerpuff Girls]] where a rivaling villain reanimates a mammoth (which appears as comically large as any city destroying monster) to cause destruction in Townsville. To stop it, Mojo-jojo instructs the girls to leave a large hunk of cheese to attract the town's mice and scare the mammoth off. And you know what? It works!
* Played straight and then subverted in an episode of [[Tom and Jerry (Animation)|Tom and Jerry]] where during the usual chase, Jerry stumbles on a circus elephant weeping from a tack stuck under its foot. Jerry removes the tack and the elephant panics, afraid of Jerry (as he is a mouse), desperately [[Grievous Harm With a Body|trying to hit him with Tom]] (who happened to be there at that moment) like a drum on a stool. Jerry shows the female elephant the tack and, in [[Androcles' Lion]] fashion, hugs Jerry in appreciation. From then on she treats Jerry like her own child, protecting him from a persistent Tom in addition to giving the cat a good beating.
* The main villain of the second half of Disney's ''Goliath II'' is a mouse in which only the titular elephant can get rid of.
* [[Tex Avery]], naturally, built an entire cartoon out of this trope. "Slap Happy Lion" has a mouse scaring a much-feared lion simply by saying "Boo!" at him. The cartoon ends with the mouse being scared by a much smaller mouse.
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* 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.
* Real life: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vDD5Up3SWE weatherman vs. cockroach].
* Psychologists who studied the [[Eek!
** 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.
* [http://learnfrommyfail.com/2010/06/07/fail-story-lfmf-learn-from-eeks-fail/ Learn From EEK's Fail].
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