Mouse Trap

In fiction, especially cartoons, the humble mouse trap seems to be far more effective at catching unwanted hands reaching into unexpected places than it is actually catching wayward mice—in many cases, they will inevitably catch the fingers of the one who set it.

In real life, it can still be just as painful as it appears, depending on the size of the trap and strength of its spring.

Compare Bear Trap for something more horrific and (not always less) comedic.

For the Agatha Christie play please go to The Mousetrap.

Examples of Mouse Trap include:

Comic Books

In the Comic Book Adaptation of Its About Time, the astronauts build a giant-sized mousetrap to trap a giant-sized mouselike creature. How they managed to get the steel to make the spring goes unmentioned.

Film

In An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, a mouse trap is disguised as a stage for the mice to sit on, which would be used to kill them all.
- In the first film, Tony trips a trap with a stick to get the cheese.
A mouse trap is part of Rattigan's elaborate Death Trap in The Great Mouse Detective. Basil and Dawson are tied to the trap, which should be enough, but the trigger is also connected to various weapons set to fire at them just to make sure. Basil pulls off a Crowning Moment of Awesome by triggering the trap early, creating a chain reaction that disables the whole thing.
Mousehunt. Loads of them.
In The Incredible Shrinking Man, the much-diminished protagonist gets stuck in a basement and has to raid a mousetrap for its cheese to avoid starving.
The short film The Contraption, starring Richard "Riff Raff" O'Brien.

Literature

One of Robert McCloskey's Homer Price stories, "Michael Murphy's Musical Mousetrap", is about a man who's spent 20 years in the mountains designing and building a better mouse trap. It doesn't quite work as planned.
Discworld
- In Moving Pictures, there's an interlude involving a man who's devoted himself to building a better mouse trap.
- In Hogfather, the Death of Rats collects a mouse that fell prey to one of these.
- In The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the Trap Disposal Squad's byword is "Be like the second mouse". The first mouse, in this parable, is the one that gets the trap rather than the cheese.

Live-Action TV

On Three's Company, the trio had a mouse, and Jack switched beds with Janet until it got caught. (Since Chrissy was a farmer's daughter, she had no problem being in the same room with a mouse.) After some hilarity ensued, Jack ended up with the mouse trap on his foot.
Hannah Montana: When a mouse invades the Stewart household, Jackson tries to catch it by covering the floor with mouse traps. However, he traps himself in a corner and tries to jump across the countertop to get out. He fails and falls, landing on and getting caught by multiple mouse traps.
One of the buzzers in Distraction was simply having to trigger a mousetrap with your hand. It broke a contestant's finger.
A cheese-centric episode of Good Eats opens with Alton laying out hundreds of mouse traps in an attempt to catch one mouse. He thinks he spots a particularly rare type of cheese and goes for it; as the title card and theme song play, we hear him yelp in pain and dozens of snapping noises.

Newspaper Comics

Mousetraps are featured in several Garfield strip. In week-long arc, a mouse is caught in one, but he's happy about it, because he has a wife and eight kids: "This is the first peace and quiet I've had in years".

Tabletop Games

Mouse Trap, in a Rube Goldberg Device sort of way.

Video Games

One section of Geist requires you to possess a mouse and traverse a veritable minefield of mouse traps. They may be in plain sight, but that cheese is surprisingly tempting.
In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, you can use a mousetrap to catch animals alive. This is important as it allows you to catch the most rare creature in the game that will end up giving you some face paint that grants you unlimited ammo if you keep it to the end of the game.
In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, before Adell joins your team, she will try to underhandedly trick your party into giving up/missing/not getting to the spoils of missions. The protagonist and Cid decide to make it seem like they forgot a rare piece of a treasure to lure Adell into walking right on a "mousetrap".
- The actual status of is questionable, though. The trapie claims not to be able to move after falling for it.

Western Animation

Oh so many Tom and Jerry shorts.
- The "Designs on Jerry" episode involved Tom building a room-filling Rube Goldberg Device which he intended to market as the "better mousetrap".
In the first Pink Panther short, "The Pink Phink", a painter sees the Panther's tracks and thinks he's dealing with a large mouse. So he gets a giant mousetrap, but the Panther sneaks up from behind and trips him, causing the trap to snap on the seat of his pants. As he walks away with the trap behind him, a mouse runs up and takes the cheese on the trap.
A Looney Tunes short featured a tank being tested to withstand various traps. It gets caught in a gigantic mousetrap.
On The Penguins of Madagascar, Skipper tests the others by having them go through a minefield of mouse traps to get a fish. Rico simply walks straight through, oblivous to the traps snapping on his person.
An Eyecatch for Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers shows Monterey Jack getting some cheese from a trap, leaving behind the wire bent in the shape of his head.
In the Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner cartoon "Chariots of Fur", Wile E. tries to catch the Roadrunner with a giant mousetrap. He catches a giant mouse instead, who then clobbers him.