Mouse Hole

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The cartoon mouse's refuge: a neat arch-shaped hole cut into a wall at the floor, sometimes with a door.

If you have one of these in your house, expect your perfectly triangular cheese wedges to go missing soon.

Often the gate to Mouse World.

Examples of Mouse Hole include:


Film

  • A rare live-action example, though more realistic looking, can be found in the movie Mouse Hunt.
  • It also appears in Willard, created by the giant rat Ben chewing through the wall.

Literature

Live-Action TV

Newspaper Comics

  • A trademark schtick of Garfield strips. Sometimes this even extends to windows with pots of flowers under them, mailboxes, welcome mats, etc.
  • Ziggy

Video Games

  • While they're not mice, the Minish in The Legend of Zelda Minish Cap have several small holes that look like this. They do, indeed, lead to the Minish's Mouse World.
  • In Luigis Mansion, these are all over the place. Some release golden mice, worth major dollars. Luigi can enter most or all with a special device, usually yielding more treasure. Or ghosts. Often both.
  • One of the first puzzles of Sam and Max Hit The Road requires you to grab a stash of cash from one of these.

Western Animation

  • Tom and Jerry, as in the picture above.
  • Early Mickey Mouse cartoons didn't show his house, but early comic strips and children's books did. It had a round, obviously mousehole-like front entrance despite Mickey's large, non-mouselike size.
    • In 1931, Mickey's house began to be shown in the cartoons and had a normal front door there, after which the ancillary material was retconned to match.
  • The "Pixie & Dixie and Mr. Jinks" shorts on The Huckleberry Hound Show
  • Likewise the Looney Tunes cartoons featuring Speedy Gonzales and, before that, Babbit and Ratstello.
    • Sniffles lived in a mouse hole in some shorts as well, even earlier.
  • Mostly averted in Walt Disney's Cinderella, but there is one.
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: Fluttershy may have purposefully installed a mouse hole in her house to shelter mice.
  • Invoked in Tex Avery's King-Size Canary, when the jumbo-sized cat and mouse do this with a train tunnel (@ 7:02).
  • You might notice the classic arch-shaped mouse holes in the floor boards in the background on The Simpsons.