Subscribe!The Mouse and the Monster (1996)
Originally posted on 06 December 2025First episode title: Chez Meets Mo / A Mouse, a Monster, and a Baby
How familiar with the show am I?: I don't think I'd heard of it.
An anthropomorphic mouse called Chez, and a Frankenstein-style monster called Mo. An unlikely pair end up as friends, and this episode will show us how.
Now this is a format I'm not sure we've seen yet - two main segments, but the first one takes up the first two-thirds of the episode and the second one is therefore around half the length. There's also a little unnamed short right at the end of the episode. The opening sequence is one of those ones that explains the basic backstory of the show, but the first segment is also one of those ones that shows us the backstory in full, so let's let the episode speak for itself!
So, the first segment, "Chez Meets Mo". It couldn't be more obvious from the title that this is the first episode. Unfortunately for my first impressions of this show, it starts by showing us some stereotypical tribespeople in huge masks circling a cauldron in which Chez and Mo are being cooked. The show has a talkative narrator who jokes in this scene how inappropriate it would be right now to ask Chez and Mo "What's cooking?" Chez is desperately trying to blow out the fire they're cooking on while Mo is eating a carrot that's cooking in the stew with them, which right away distinguishes what sort of character they each are.
Chez looks like a pretty ordinary cartoon mouse; Mo is big and turquoise and has just one cyclops eye. Chez has a nervous, sort of Woody Allen type of voice, while Mo sounds like a laid-back hippie. Mo tells Chez to chill out and have some of the soup and Chez has to tell him that they are the soup, and then questions how he got into this mess in the first place. As you would no doubt expect, this triggers the start of a flashback that will take up most of this segment. Weird spoiler alert: this flashback will in no way actually explain how they got kidnapped by cannibals. It just doesn't come up. And yet this situation is what triggers it for some reason. I guess maybe we're supposed to interpet it as him thinking about how he got into the mess of knowing Mo and getting dragged into these situations as a result.
At the start of the flashback, Chez works at a cheese factory called "Cheesy Cheese Co." That doesn't sound very trademarkable. Inside, cows (non-anthropomorphic) are hooked up to milking machines, and one of them gets its whole body drained dry by the machine somehow - it unhooks itself, gulps down the entire contents of a watercooler to restore it to its original shape, and then hooks itself back up to the machine! If it was just the getting milked dry bit then it could be a commentary on animal cruelty, but no, it's just an absurd joke.
Speaking of absurd jokes, Chez's job at the factory is to chew the holes into Swiss cheese, which he complains was terrible for his cholesterol. We see him clocking out on one of those old-fashioned punch clocks - instead of something like "in" and "out", the two slots are labelled "dawn" and "dusk". It occurs to me that the phrase "from dawn till dusk" is meant to imply spending a long time working, even though depending on the time of year I'm sometimes working longer than that. Then his narration tells us how lonely his work was, as we see his long walk home. The moon comes alive to berate him about the dump of a house he lives in, but then turns back into a normal moon and Chez seems to realise it was a hallucination, saying he needs to cut down on Pepper Jack (a spicy type of cheese).
The dump of a house turns out to be a typical spooky mansion with localised lightning, owned by a mad scientist called Dr Wackerstein. Chez specifically says he was always trying to stay out of Wackerstein's way, and we see him enter the house by ringing the doorbell then sneaking through the now open door before Wackerstein can see who's there - is he living in there without Wackerstein's knowledge at all? Wackerstein is a short man with a lab coat, a moustache, and big glasses. It also seems like he's supposed to have purple skin, but the hue varies wildly from shot to shot. We follow him rather than Chez inside the house, and see Wackerstein's wife Olga, who is tall and green-skinned with a pink beehive hairdo. The inside of the house looks like a Hallowe'en decoration store, with bats and snakes and a literal skeleton in the closet!
Wackerstein says it's time to attend to his "victims", which he quickly corrects to "patients", and then he addresses Olga as Igor, like a stereotypical mad scientist's assistant, which annoys her. She says she is going to "zetz" him now, which is apparently a Yiddish-derived word meaning "hit", but she does it by taking out a large brass instrument of vague categorisation and blasts him with it, producing an elephant-like noise that flattens him. Then she says zetzing bores her and it's time to dance, and she skips away without changing the serious expression on her face.
Chez enters his area of the house through what's shaped like a mousehole, but because he's a full-sized anthro mouse it just comes across as a doorless doorway. His room really is a dump, like the moon said. And he mentions he was lonely, and that his only companion never said very much - he's talking about the life-sized ballerina doll that's visible in the room, which could be a sex doll joke if you're so inclined.
We see the waiting room for Wackerstein's office, Olga sitting at a desk appearing to play the role of receptionist too. She's reading a magazine called "Oblique" which, when we see the pages, is entirely blank. She comments that she thinks she's already read this issue. I think the impression we're meant to get from her is that of a pretentiously artsy European who acts above everything else, hence her lack of apparent emotion.
Wackerstein's actual office is full of organs in jars and sharp-looking tools. The woman who walks in when he calls for the next patient says that her husband Harold just stares ever since Wackerstein operated on him - Harold has a row of stitches all around his head below the forehead, so it looks like he has had his brain removed! Wackerstein goes to get something for Harold, accidentally opening a cabinet full of labelled brains in jars and scrambling to hide it - I'm pretty sure one we can barely see says "Disney" on it - and instead gives Harold some pills. Whether Wackerstein is just trying to get Harold out of there or is genuinely insane enough to think pills can help him now is hard to tell.
Chez-the-narrator explains that he went walking through the house one night to work out what was going on around there, and Mo says that the story is getting scary, so Chez explains that this is about to be the moment where Mo appears. Chez-in-the-flashback finds a blackboard with a diagram of two half-brains being put into Mo's head, labelled "1/2 beatnik, 1/2 lunatic". We are not given any reason why Wackerstein would think this would be a good combination to put into a monster body, but then again, he is crazy.
That's when flashback-era Mo first appears, picking up Chez by the ears. He's wearing ordinary sunglasses but then takes them off to reveal his single eye, a gag that might work better if we hadn't already seen what he looks like. He rambles a mix of beatnik-y things, like referring to Chez as "mouse cat", and insane non sequiturs like "No, mommy, don't make me play with the walrus boy!" He finishes his speech by asking if Chez has any "squid gumballs" on him, and there's a box of them on a nearby table, which he hands over. The camera zooms out for this and we finally see that Mo is still strapped to a slab like the stereotypical Frankenstein's monster would be when he comes to life, as if he got up and just pulled it out of the ground in the process.
From there it cuts to a montage of Chez and Mo's friendship, Chez sneaking back to that same basement every night to hang out with Mo, eating together and such. Mo apparently made Chez a "nose flute" by biting holes in a pencil, and they make a cool-looking band with Mo on bongos. Present-day Chez says that every morning he has to strap Mo back down, which draws attention to the fact that Mo isn't otherwise attached to the slab in the montage, and also implies Chez can easily undo and do it back up himself, which we'll find interesting in a moment.
Chez says that one night he witnessed something horrible, and it shows him entering the basement to see Olga running her nails down a chalkboard. So then he has to add that he saw something even more horrible than that. It's Mo, attached via a tube from his mouth to a machine which Wackerstein is using to force-feed him liverwurst in order to break his spirit and make Mo do whatever Wackerstein wants. The present-day Chez can't bring himself to say the word liverwurst because Mo doesn't want to hear it. Well, that does sound traumatic. Chez says that things got even worse when "that brain" showed up, and when Mo asks what brain, Chez says he'll tell him in a minute - yes, the ad break cliffhanger is even a cliffhanger for Chez's story in-universe!
When Wackerstein opens up a case containing a brain... well, I have a feeling that fans of a certain computer game will like this gif for some reason.
Holding up the brain in his bare hands with no regard for hygienic handling of organs, Wackerstein declares that Mo is only one liverwurst treatment away from being ready to receive the brain of famous piano player Flatnoteski, who Wackerstein has a shrine to in that same basement. We see in Wackerstein's imagination Mo dressed as Flatnoteski playing the piano for him, and Wackerstein explains that that's why he had to create Mo, to give Flatnoteski the "perfect body". It's hard to see how Mo is the perfect body, and even the brain itself seems to agree, as a thought bubble full of question marks appears over it at those words.
Chez in the flashback notices a button that says "ripple dissolve", so he presses it, and the aforementioned type of transition happens in order to show us another flashback (within the flashback). Chez-the-narrator says that he didn't know this following part back then - okay, so the button was purely a visual gag, of course. This further flashback is in a fancy concert hall where Flatnoteski is about to play his final song of the performance - he addresses the audience first, and he has a more American voice than you might expect from a piano player with a name like his. To humorously foreshadow his death that we know is coming, he's about to play the "Coronary Overture" by "Wolfgang von Aneurysm".
In the audience are Wackerstein and Olga, Wackerstein excited that this piece is the one with the "big finish". Oh, the dramatic irony. Olga complains that this sort of music is too "melodic" for her - she must be the type of villain who uses nice terms like they're bad and vice versa. Flatnoteski starts playing the tune enthusiastically, and then his heart pops out on a spring and he collapses onto the piano. The crowd gasps in horror, except Olga, who enjoyed that part (not that her face shows it).
Wackerstein is horrified, but then has an idea in a thought bubble, meaning we're very briefly seeing an imagine spot inside a flashback inside another flashback! He's picturing Mo, and that inspires him to rush up to the stage and take the brain right out of the dead body. Underneath Flatnoteski's hair he has a ring-pull on his head for easy access!
Back in the first flashback, Wackerstein announces that tomorrow will be the day they will dispose of Mo's temporary brain to insert Flatnoteski's. Why the temporary brain if this body was for Flatnoteski? Why the liverwurst if they're only going to remove the brain it was being inflicted on? It's hard to say. When Wackerstein and Olga are gone, Chez sneaks in to rescue Mo, not wanting to lose the friend he had made, but for some reason he has trouble undoing the strap that he's supposed to have been unhooking every night. What happened to it? Chez goes looking for something to help, idly says "liverwurst" when noticing a can of it, and that brings on a panic in Mo, strong enough for him to burst out of the strap!
Wackerstein and Olga come back into the room, though, catching Chez in the act. For once, here, present-day Mo actually remembers something that happened without being told about it - he remembers Chez spilling his bag of squid gumballs, which he would obviously miss. Chez covers the floor in them to make the rushing doctor and his wife slip across the room. As they slide away, legs flailing madly on the gumballs, Olga glances at the screen and says that she's going to work these moves into her next dance performance.
Chez and Mo take their chance to flee the room, which we now see from outside is actually labelled "Dungeon". On the wall is one of those mounted stuffed animal head plaques, except it's the back half of a deer that's attached to it. They flee into a lift, but then the front doors of the lift fall down and we see that it's actually a fridge-freezer inside. They get lowered to another floor and then slide out in ice cubes, reminding me weirdly of the Frozen Wario transformation in the Wario Land games, continuing uncontrollably forward until they hit a wall and break out of the ice.
The next room they flee into is full of dead stuffed animals, guns, and trophies - presumably for hunting? Is this another interest Wackerstein has? On the wall are two more plaques for heads to be mounted on, labelled Mouse and Monster! Scary, but nonsensical for the plot - Wackerstein doesn't want Mo decapitated considering his plans for his body, and he wasn't supposed to know Chez existed until now! The room after that is full of plants. There is a great gag where the pair stop between a big Little Shop of Horrors-style mouthy plant and a tiny yellow flower, and it's the tiny one that suddenly opens a giant mouth and roars at them. They jump up, crash out of the room through the ceiling, and that finally gets them out of the house!
Next we see a desert, where Wackerstein and Olga are in a car driving along, obviously looking for Mo. A couple of funny little details in the establishing shot - there's a cactus in a plant pot as if it's been placed there deliberately, and there's a sign saying "Just Desert - pop. 2 at the moment".
Wackerstein is of course driving at night, and he's asleep at the wheel until he suddenly hits an old man and a donkey, who are flattened against the car's bonnet! We then see that Flatnoteski's brain is being kept in a booster seat in the back of the car, like a baby. Aww. The sudden impact causes another thought bubble from the brain, consisting of a sound wave with an exclamation mark on it, accompanied by a burst of piano music. This is how a great piano player experiences surprise, apparently!
Wackerstein calms the brain down by reassuring it that he'll find the monster and give him his new body, which causes the sound wave to become some dancing silhouettes, and the piano music gets happier. Then, we see that Mo is hanging on to the back bumper of the car, with Chez holding on to his back. Chez tries to get Mo to let go of the car, as the stitching holding Mo's arm together is starting to tear apart! Mo doesn't understand what he's trying to say, so Chez offers him another gumball, distracting him enough to let go, although the pair of them continue to skid forward and Chez crashes into a cactus. Ow.
Chez complains about the situation he's in, having lost everything and gained only Mo - interestingly he describes Mo as "indigo", not a colour normally heard outside of listing the colours of the rainbow, and usually a darker shade of blue than Mo is. Mo reassures Chez that things could be worse, and that takes us back to the present day, with the two of them being cooked by the cannibals. The chief of the tribe says he wants to eat a leg because it's the best part, and Chez prompts him to say that the worst part is the liver as an unnecessarily drawn out way to cause the word "liverwurst" to be said, when really he could have just yelled it himself. Mo, of course, panics at the sound of the word, his legs crashing through the bottom of the cauldron and carrying himself and Chez away.
And somehow that's how the segment ends. Like I said, no explanation of how they got into the situation with the cannibals at all, or even any sense of how long since the events with Wackerstein the present-day events are taking place.
The second segment, "A Mouse, a Monster, and a Baby", confuses me about this show's status quo even more, because now Chez and Mo are living together in a hotel room in a city, with no mention of Wackerstein or Olga. I guess they eventually found a place to stay where they could be safe from them? Or do the bad guys always show up in this new place too and this segment just happens to be one that doesn't feature them?
Ches and Mo's landlord is a very standard one, an old guy with a tank top and a cigar who knocks on their door yelling about the rent being due. The pair hide and pretend they're not in - fair enough - and so he leaves, grumbling.
As Mo comments that that was close, there's another, much louder bang on the door. He thinks it's the Sunday paper and rushes to the door, only for he and Chez to both be flattened as a giant baby in only a nappy and slippers crawls through the door, taking up all of it! For some reason the baby says "Baby's here" as he comes through. Chez exclaims that it's "Baby Pookers", so apparently this baby is known to him, although there's no mention of who this baby's parents are. The baby starts eating the rug that Chez and Mo are standing on and Chez comments that he must be hungry.
So they decide to feed the baby. Chez tries to shovel some kind of pink slop from a bucket into Pookers' mouth - what even is that and where did they get it? - but Mo starts drooling at the sight of the baby food and eats it himself. When Chez turns around to berate him, the baby takes the opportunity to eat Chez instead! Mo tries to drag Chez back out and fails, but then the baby needs to spit up and Chez comes flying out in a shower of drool. And as if things weren't disgusting enough, the baby then poops in his nappy, thankfully not too explicitly (he just strains and then there are stink lines). Unfortunately this sort of humour does not really appeal to me. So, Chez says the baby will need a diaper change.
We see two trucks driving away with a huge pile of stinky diapers each, as if the child's nappy is made of a whole bunch of them put together. So Chez and Mo have arranged for these to be taken away... and obtained new ones from somewhere, since the baby has his nappy again later... and still they haven't called his parents or done anything about getting the baby himself off their hands? Why would he at all be their responsibility in this scenario? And then Chez says it's time to give the baby a bath.
Chez and Mo lower the baby into the bath using a rope and pulley system - where are they getting all this stuff? There is what you would presume to be a plastic duck already in the bath, but it looks shocked and sweats when it sees the bulk of the baby being lowered onto it, and when the baby splashes around in the bath, it causes the duck to shoot out around the room.
Chez prepares milk for the baby by milking an actual cow, and I am starting to suspect we're just not supposed to question why all these things are in their home. But he hears crying and goes back into the bathroom to see what's going on - it turns out Mo wants to play with the duck so he's jealous of Pookers. Yes, he's just as much of a baby. To be fair, he was only created recently. But then the baby picks up Chez, gets an evil look on his face, and tosses the duck aside (pleasing Mo) as he starts contorting Chez into shapes and making him dive under the water. Then he gets mad that the toy is "broken" and punches through the wall - the next room is another apartment's bathroom, and an old man in the bath, wearing balloons on his ears for some reason, asks if anyone wants to play with his ships and subs. I really don't know.
Chez whispers to Mo that it's time for the baby's "N-A-P", but the old man loudly asks "Nap?" and the baby starts shouting that he doesn't want to go to sleep. So Mo tries placating the baby with a "Baby Bad Mouth" doll, a cute blonde girl with a hair bow whose head spins around and spurts sludge everywhere. Chez is not pleased but Mo just licks up some of the slime that landed on him, exclaiming "holy guacamole"... but I doubt that's what the green stuff is.
Activating the doll involves pulling its tongue, and when the baby tries to do it again, it breaks. So he complains the toy is broken and picks up Chez to play with him again, stretching his tongue out too and bashing him around... until coins fall out of Chez's pockets. That's when the landlord walks in, saying that the baby has collected the rent for him just like he asked him to! Wait, what? All this was somehow an elaborate plan to get the rent money? How does any of that even work??
The landlord and the baby go off to threaten the next apartment, and then Mo has a weird rant about how it was his turn to have his head smashed in by the baby, and also about how the show is called "The Mouse and the Monster" and not "The Monster and the Mouse". I've skipped over it a lot, but Mo does mutter quite a bit in between his more relevant lines, like they just told the voice actor to go ahead and ramble whenever he didn't have anything better to say.
That's how that segment ends, but there's one more little short to finish the episode. On stage in front of a crowd, with a screen behind him, Chez presents an instalment of "101 Stupid Ways to Use Cheese" - in this instance, it's being used as a parachute. On the screen, Mo jumps out of a plane with Chez hanging on to him, making a little joke when he jumps: "Geroni-Mo! That's me!" He releases the parachute, and it's hole-filled Swiss cheese, so they continue to plummet to the ground. Heh, this isn't even the first time we've seen a joke where someone tries to use something full of holes as a parachute - it happened at the end of Piggsburg Pigs too!
The first segment of this was an enjoyable cartoon, but I wasn't as much of a fan of the second. As a whole, the show put me in mind of things like 2 Stupid Dogs and Rocko's Modern Life, although it's not on their level.