Bats

Bats
Background information
Short films	The Flying Mouse
Group information
Members	Various unnamed bats
Home	A cave
Status	Active

“No mouse can fly, so you got wings. So if you ain't a bat - ha ha ha - you're nothing! Think of that.”

―One of the bats welcoming the Flying Mouse

The Bats are characters featured in the 1934 Silly Symphony short The Flying Mouse. They are a flock of bats living in a cave where they were the ones that greeted the Flying Mouse when he received bat wings - albeit treating him as an outcast.

Background

Personality

They are a group of bats that live in a cave. When they first greet the Flying Mouse, they are shown to have a sinister personality when they greet him - more often treating him as an outcast upon staring at the Mouse with bat wings. They are also shown to humiliate the Mouse treating him with misjudgment, giving him a bad reputation where he was not greeted by the birds nor his family.

Physical appearance

Each bat is identical to each other - mainly having a black body, a pale gray underbelly, turquoise to black wings, three toes sticking out of each foot, and four claws they use as hands located on the tip of each wing. They also have yellow eyes and black pupils and despite being bats, they have rodent-like ears instead of triangular chiropteran-like ears.

Role in the short

After being rejected by the birds and mice, the Flying Mouse finds himself in a cave where he encounters a bat who taunts him and upon staring at his wings, he tells him that no mouse could fly, explaining that if he had no wings, he is nothing more than a bat like him. Three more bats drop down from above as they taunt him for the wings the Flying Mouse has, as they sing "You're Nothin' But a Nothin'", treating him like an outcast.

The bats then humiliate him, saying that he is nothing but an outcast, which only frightens the Mouse. The Mouse escapes from the bats' cave and looks at a pond where he reflects himself, which his reflection hallucinates into a bat, which scares him as he runs away after the reflection tells him that he is an outcast. However, the Butterfly Fairy manages to help get rid of the mouse's wings so that he can be himself.

Trivia

• The way the Flying Mouse is not welcomed by the birds nor his family and instead greeted only by the bats is similar to Aesop's Fable, "The Bat, the Bird, and the Beast".
• The bat that welcomes the Flying Mouse was voiced by Billy Sheets. The Three Rhythm Kings performed the choral group of the incidental bats' singing lines, making them the only voice actors besides Sheets to provide other male voices in the short.

Gallery