The Yankee Doodle Mouse

The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943) is an eight-minute Tom and Jerry short you can watch online on iFILM. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera directed this wartime episode, where the pair's usual house-to-house fight turns into a full military campaign staged in a basement.

Jerry plays the American forces; Tom is the enemy. The mouse's arsenal runs to tomatoes, eggs labeled "Hen Grenades," and light bulbs dropped from a toy plane like bombs. A telegram reading "Sighted Cat — Sank Same" shows up on screen as a direct parody of actual battle dispatches that 1943 audiences recognized immediately. The short took the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film that year. Stream it on iFILM.