One expensive mouse
- Nov 19, 2017
- 1 min read
In 1945 Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, and Gene Kelly starred in the hit musical comedy Anchors Aweigh. It is about two sailors that go on a four-day leave in Hollywood. The two sailors meet an amazing singer in which they try to help her get an audition at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The movie has dancing, singing, love, and Jerry the mouse? Well that's right, Jerry mouse even appears in this hit American Musical.
In the scene below, it made the movie very well known. It features a dance scene and animation between the two stars: Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse.
Jerry Mouse plays the lonesome king who has abolished dance and singing because he doesn't know how to dance. Gene Kelly comes across the king in a scene and just reassures him that all you have to do in order to dance is be happy, and they danced together. The scene demonstrates the coming together of live dancing and animation.
For this famous scene, Mickey Mouse was originally called for the part, but Walt Disney refused to use his mouse in a MGM film. So, Kelly turned to MGM's own animated characters and used Jerry from Tom and Jerry. The writers and directors of Tom and Jerry had noticed that Jerry didn't have a shadow when dancing next to Gene in the scenes. The animators had forgotten to draw the shadows on Jerry before adding him into the scenes. Additional money had to be made in order for the extra 10,000 drawings of Jerry.
The iconic dance scene took an entire two months for perfection and a whopping
$100,000 to produce.
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