Before there was Itchy and Scratchy.....

Well, the Stooge shorts are coming to an end soon, so I guess I should wean myself onto a new feature.  Somehow I ended up with the 2-disc DVD of Tom and Jerry, so I might as well do that, no?  That'll eat up some time, right?
Anyway, the first is one called The Yankee Doodle Mouse, and the Tom and Jerry shorts are the only ones I know of that brag about being Oscar winners like this.  Well, maybe Disney did it too.  I wouldn't know, and I don't want to violate any Disney copyrights by reviewing their shorts.  I don't want to take the chance.
But back to the instant case.  We start off innocently enough with the cat chasing the mouse.  The mouse runs into the basement where, well, to put it mildly, he seems more prepared than Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone to extract vengeance upon the cat... or is that exact?  They also shoot a lot of fireworks at each other.  Kids: do not play with fireworks the way these two do.
At one point, the fireworks follow the mouse around, much like the pool balls in Cueball Cat.  Ooh!  That's coming up later.  That's the good news.  The bad news: it's about 24 weeks away.  Anyhow, I don't know what makes this so Oscar-worthy; perhaps the parallels between the cat and Hitler, perhaps the pacing of the action.  One of the calmer moments is when... SPOILER ALERT... the giant firecracker burns down, and it turns out to be some kind of Russian nesting firecracker.  It loses its outer shell when the outer shell breaks into two halves.  It makes an interesting sound when it drops.

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-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan