. . . squirting from our ears, which is about as logical as the wee mouse Sniffles and his sidekick Bookworm being able to push the button for the 15th Floor of "Lacy's" Department Store as the Warner Bros. animated short TOY TROUBLE begins. Back in the 1900s there used to be a national chain of downtown high-rise glorified general stores called "Macy's." Few had pet departments with live cats given the run of the store after closing time, as is the case with Warner's cloned "Lacy's" store. Maybe some sold Mini Robots wearing Blackface, as depicted in TOY TROUBLE, given the on-going popularity in the early 1940s of that homage to Southern Racism, GONE WITH THE WIND. Maybe some Macy's (or competing stores such as Gimbel's or Hudson's) featured long rows of Porky Pig dolls, as seen in TOY TROUBLE, though this may represent wishful thinking on the part of the Warner Bros. Product Placement People. Anyway, the yellow-eyed blue feline from SNIFFLES BELLS THE CAT is back in TOY TROUBLE, as dumb (literally--he's as mute as Sylvester would prove loquacious) and hapless as ever.

This cartoon has stuck with me all my life. I've even drawn upon it as a classroom teacher. The essential brilliance is the contrast between the two menaces. As Sniffles and the bookworm wander about the toy store, they are stalked by the store's cat. But when they turn a corner, they are threatened by the mechanical duck. The cat is rational: it wants to kill and eat. It's dangerous, but it has a motive, and thus there's a certain predictability to it that can be used to evade or defeat it. The mechanical duck, on the other hand, is entirely irrational, therefore unpredictable. In "real life" it would be the familiar child's pull toy. But Jones portrays it from a low angle, so that it looks huge. I always found it very scary.

i know a lot of people on this site consider SNIFFLES too annoying or too cute( i have NO idea why). the animation is 1st rate and the way sniffles talks a-million-words-a-minute is hilarious!don't miss one of the funniest scenes in animation--- when the wind-up toy duck chases sniffles up and down the toy store. yes, sniffles is passed off as being cute---but, practically all animation was like that in the 1930's and 1940's. i believe his other cartoons shine as well. such as, in another cartoon, sniffles befriends an electric razor and the electric razor somehow gets drunk and was singing to the tune of "how dry i am" .to me, it is a terrible shame that cartoons like this are not made anymore.god bless you,CHUCK JONES, for wonderful work!---STEVEN PAUL LYNCH

This is a very cute cartoon starring Sniffles and his friend the inchworm. However, despite excellent production values, I have a hard time enjoying this cartoon because the character of Sniffles is so gosh darn annoying! In fact, he is one of the most cloying and sickeningly sweet characters ever created by Looney Tunes. I think most of this is because of his cutesy-cutesy voice, but also because they tried so hard to make him sweet and likable that the character became saccharine and difficult to stomach. My advice is to skip this and all other Sniffles cartoons and concentrate on the later and much better Warner Brothers characters, such as Bugs Bunny.By the way, although I saw a lot of Sniffles cartoons as a kid back in the early 70s, I have noticed that they are rarely shown on TV today--maybe people have wised up!