YMMV / Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures

• Anvilicious: "Don't Touch That Dial" comes off as irritatingly preachy due to its message that this show is the only cartoon worth watching and everything else airing at the time was dreck.
• Awesome Music: The A cappella/barbershop theme song.
• Genre Turning Point: John Kricfalusi explained the series' massive influence on and importance to all American animation that would come after it to the AV Club in 2001:
  It was the first series that was completely created by cartoonists: It was written by cartoonists, all the creative decisions were made by cartoonists, and we created all the characters. It was totally different from anything anybody had done. We broke every rule you could think of, everything they told you that you couldn't do. [...] A whole bunch of things we did once or twice on Mighty Mouse became whole trends in other people's cartoons. Everybody copied it instantly.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Like much of his own work (especially The Ren & Stimpy Show), there are a lot of scenes in this show that become increasingly uncomfortable once John Kricfalusi's history of mental illness and pedophilia came to light:
    • Petey Pate's mental breakdown over Pearl Pureheart calling him mad in "Night on Bald Pate" becomes a lot less funny after Kricfalusi was discovered to have had at least two undiagnosed mental illnesses for most of his life, both of which he medicated with alcohol.
    • "Mighty's Benefit Plan" has Elwee and the Tree Weasels show signs of being uncomfortable whenever their adoptive father attempts to show them affection. Kricfalusi himself ended up grooming two teenage animators, Robyn Bird and Katie Rice, for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s under the guise of mentorship.
    • "The Littlest Tramp" ends with the implied-teenaged Polly Pineblossom marrying a Kirk Douglas-lookalike named Big Murray. Kricfalusi's fanatical worship of manly-man types like Douglas and his own father are said to have contributed to his own sexually abusive habits.
  • The entire premise of "The Ice Goose Cometh" is centered on Gandy Goose being unfrozen and finding out no one remembers him in 1987. Come the following decades, and hardly anyone remembers any of the Terrytoons stars outside of its small but loyal fanbase due to the complete absence of mainstream exposure of the cartoons since the '90s.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Snow White and the Motor City Dwarfs" has a witch transporting a fairy tale princess into the big city. Sound familiar?
  • The back-up story in the fifth issue of the Marvel comic has Bat-Bat trying to find out who threatens to pan his movie Bat-Bat 2. This story was published a year before Batman Returns was released.
• Ho Yay: Gandy Goose and Sourpuss have interactions between them and statements about each other that could make people wonder whether they're truly just friends. Gandy acts as a housemaid to Mighty Mouse in "The Ice Goose Cometh" and responds to Mighty disliking the birdseed sandwich he made him by saying that Sourpuss always liked birdseed, while "Mighty's Wedlock Whimsy" shows Gandy and Sourpuss showering together.
• Never Live It Down: If the show is remembered for anything, it's for that notorious scene in "The Littlest Tramp" in which Mighty Mouse sniffs a flower given to him by Polly Pineblossom earlier in the episode, by which point it's been crushed into a fine powder, making it look as though he's snorting cocaine. Moral Guardians were outraged immediately, even though the crew members themselves said that it wasn't meant to be a cocaine joke and that the moral guardians (like many before and after them) blew things out of proportion. Even John Kricfalusi thought so, but only because there were two other scenes that were more dubious: The Kirk Douglas-esque man force-kissing Polly Pineblossom (and the fact that she's forced to marry him to save herself from being homeless) and the end when the two drive off into the sunset and the car explodes into a mushroom cloud for no reason.
• Once Original, Now Common: It's near impossible to appreciate just how much of a breath of fresh air The New Adventures was to TV animation circa 1987. At a time when factory-assembled shows and glorified toy commercials reigned supreme, it was unheard of for a show to be written, storyboarded and animated entirely by a key team of artists given almost complete creative control like a Golden Age-era cartoon studio, complete with theatrical short-style cartoon animation, the likes of which had never been created for TV (even if the creators frequently agree that there are a lot of errors). Everyone copied it immediately, none the least of which was series director John Kricfalusi with The Ren & Stimpy Show, and creator-driven cartoons became the norm within five years, remaining so to this day. Much of the show's jokes about the then-current state of TV animation also quickly became preachy and annoyingly cynical once everything it was criticizing disappeared almost entirely.
• Protection from Editors: Up until the "crushed flower controversy", CBS didn't care what Ralph Bakshi and co. produced each week so long as they delivered it on time and under budget (which they did). This is not to say Bakshi wasn't fighting off censors left and right, rather he was simply very good at negotiation and was such a force of personality that nobody challenged him.
• Retroactive Recognition: The whole staff of the show is a who's-who of future animation names, including John Kricfalusi, Andrew Stanton, Bruce Timm and Tom Minton.
• The Scrappy: Parodied by Mighty Mouse's occasional sidekick, Scrappy the mouse.
• Shallow Parody: "Don't Touch That Dial" centers around disdainful spoofs of The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, and The Real Ghostbusters that only superficially resemble what is being spoofed. The Flintstones and The Jetsons are amalgamated into The Jetstones with the bulk of the satire being that the show has an annoying theme song rather than valid criticisms on any of either cartoon's actual content, the Scooby-Doo spoof shows the characters as being different ethnicities and the Fred Jones analogue having a British accent and an afro when the characters were all white Americans in the source material, and the spoof of The Real Ghostbusters consists of an Animesque quartet of men with wild, multicolored hair who all talk like Bill Murray and wear identical jumpsuits, when the cartoon actually made an effort to make Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz, Winston Zeddemore, and Peter Venkman more diverse and easier to distinguish than how they were depicted in Ghostbusters (1984). The only exception is the Rocky and Bullwinkle parody, and even then that's only because the Bullwinkle parody is a diminutive super-intelligent moose while the Rocky parody is Rocky Balboa.
  • The Ghostbusters parody is particularly annoying because it was meant by J. Michael Straczynski to be better than most merchandise-driven cartoons. The Mighty Mouse parody makes it look completely humorous when it certainly was quite the opposite.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The giant robotic duplicates of Mighty Mouse created by Petey Pate in "Mouse and Supermouse" can be seen as this, since they're much more humanoid in appearance and they speak in a stilted monotone.
• The Woobie: Gandy Goose becomes this in "The Ice Goose Cometh". He was frozen in 1944 and didn't thaw out until 1987, finding out that nobody remembers him or his cartoons anymore. On top of that, he suffers from separation anxiety due to missing his old partner, Sourpuss. Thankfully, he gets a happy ending when Mighty Mouse finds Sourpuss and reunites the duo.

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