Henpecked Rooster (1944) User Reviews

A fair cartoon which has its moments, with the ending being the best part.

[llltdesq · 7/10 · 16 October 2006]

This is an average short-nothing remarkable here, but nothing terrible either. It's a competent and cute little cartoon. I'm going to discuss a few details, so a minor spoiler alert is in order:

Herman the mouse is in this short, voiced by Arnold Stang. I'm not absolutely positive, but the voice of the rooster sounds like it was provided by Jack Mercer, who received writing credit and often did voice work (credited and uncredited-Mercer was the primary voice for Popeye for years and, in my opinion, the best voice Popeye ever had) for both Fliescher and Famous Studios.

The rooster of the title is, indeed, "henpecked", with a hen for a wife who is probably over-qualified to be merely called a "shrew". She bullies and abuses the rooster thoroughly, until Herman, realizing that the hen is terrified of him, strikes a deal with the rooster to avoid drowning. With Herman's help, the rooster gains the upper hand-temporarily.

Mrs. Rooster pens a note to Mrs. Mouse and it turns out that Herman is in the same boat as the rooster is-their wives must have taken "Advanced Rolling-pin 404" together. The little wife starts to reassert her dominance until the rooster takes his salvation into his own wings and dons a mouse suit. The ending is the funniest part of the short, so I won't spoil it here.

As I said, this is nothing special, but it is an enjoyable little short. It's floating around on a video tape/DVD or two, though I have seen copies with audio/video synchronization problems. Worth watching.

Good To Hear Stang

[ccthemovieman-1 · 5/10 · 7 August 2007]

You can add me to the list of people who laughed at Arnold Stang, especially doing his chocolate candy bar commercials way back in the 1950s, I believe. Anyway, most people my age have a soft spot for this guy.

In some 1940 cartoons, like the one listed above, he voiced the character of a little mouse called "Uncle Herman." In this story, he gets involved in a poor rooster named Henry who is bossed around by his loud-and-demanding wife, hence the title. The woman sees the mouse and orders Henry to find it and kill it. Henry grabs our little buddy and is ready to drown him when Herman says, "Wait, I think I can help you be the boss in your family." He whispers something into this ear and Henry seems receptive.

We see what the plan was, how it works and then backfires. All in all, a very weak cartoon for humor. Even the artwork was boring, as the whole thing is done in brown colors and has a dullness to it. However, from what I've been told by someone who is educated about this short film, if I had a look at the original print of this cartoon and then it had been restored correctly for the DVD, it would have made this look far better and much more appealing. Sometimes a bad VHS or DVD print can make a decent cartoon look bad. This may be the case here. A better transfer would have given the story some spark.

The only thing I laughed at the was zinger they writes gave a fellow comedian. A big hen is seen nearby reading a book called, "How To Lay An Egg" by Bob Hope.

One of the weaker Herman cartoons

[TheLittleSongbird · 6/10 · 18 January 2015]

This is coming from someone who isn't a big fan of Herman or his cartoons, don't hate them, just not crazy about them. Henpecked Rooster is not a great cartoon and has faults, one of the weaker ones. The cartoon is rather low on laughs in both dialogue(none of the dialogue stands out here) and gags, the only funny part really is the ending. The animation is very flatly coloured and limited in backgrounds(the character designs for the roosters are odd-looking, Herman is fine though). And while she is a character that you are supposed to hate from the very beginning I still found Henry's wife a truly insufferable character especially with the grating voice.

The music is superb however, it's very sly and characterful and the use of instrumentation and articulation is clever and synchronises with the visuals very well indeed, the standout being the ending. The ending is the funniest and cleverest Henpecked Rooster gets, and it is pretty hilarious and one of the better and more original endings to any Herman cartoon. What makes Henpecked Rooster good is that the story agreed is one of the least predictable of them. By general cartoon standards it is nothing special at all, but while the stories for most of the Herman cartoons are painfully formulaic Henpecked Rooster tries to be different, and while not quite for a general cartoon for a Herman cartoon it works. Enjoyable too is the interplay between Herman and Henry and their character dynamics, they work very strongly together, Herman is more likable than usual and Henry is an easy character to feel sympathy for, the sympathy lessons when he gets his own back but when he has the sort of wife he has his actions are completely understandable. Arnold Stang and Jack Mercer do fine jobs with the voice acting.

In conclusion, not great but for a Herman cartoon it's watchable. 6/10 Bethany Cox

This brief cartoon addresses the well-known fact that if you drop . . .

[cricket30 · 6/10 · 4 March 2020]

. . . a dozen frog legs into a pot of boiling water they'll all hop to safety immediately, but IF you dunk them in a vessel of lukewarm liquid and then set your stove for "Slow Boil," your lazy legs will kick back like a half dozen dudes in a jacuzzi and gradually expire before they know it. Both HENPECKED ROOSTER and SCRAPPILY MARRIED feature the line "I'll clip your wings, and cut you down to a croquette!" The rooster Henry makes this threat in the latter animated short, while his humongous spouse Chicken-pie reiterates it during this fowl outing. Certainly such banter presents a pleasant air of fatalism as one chows down upon a batch of freshly cooked McNuggets or a drumstick from a KFC bucket of chicken. Picturing our feathered friends fretting in their cramped cages thinking "I just can't wait to stretch out in some guy or doll's alimentary canal" makes it feel like we're doing these birds a Public Service by devouring them to end their misery!

Ruling the roost in a coop d'etat

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 8/10 · 18 February 2007]

I'm a fan of Arnold Stang, but I dislike the Uncle Herman cartoons for which he provided the main character's voice. All the cartoons putting Uncle Herman at odds with Katnip the Cat have exactly the same boring plot. 'The Henpecked Rooster', at least, is a Herman cartoon which places the character in a different situation, and which offers some interesting character dynamics.

Henry the rooster is bullied by his unnamed wife (Henrietta?), who summons him by shouting 'Hen-REEEE!' in an imitation of Henry Aldrich's mother. I agree with previous IMDb reviewer Robert Reynolds that the uncredited actor who voices Henry was probably Jack Mercer; however, the actor is definitely imitating radio performer Bill Thompson: specifically, Thompson's portrayal of Wally Wimple, the henpecked husband from the 'Fibber McGee and Molly' radio programme.

Henry does all the housework while his wife reads a book titled 'How to Lay an Egg, by Bob Hope'. (That's the best gag in this cartoon.) At this point, the score (by Winston Sharples) offers a snatch of 'Thanks for the Memory'.

When a mouse (Herman) shows up, the hen orders her husband to get rid of him. But Herman offers to help Henry reverse the balance of power in his chicken coop (a coop d'etat?). Soon enough, Henry is bullying his wife, and cheerfully enjoying the reversal.

Paramount's cartoons from this period have never impressed me, yet I actually found myself intrigued by 'The Henpecked Rooster' because my sympathies changed as the characters' relationships changed. I felt sorry for henpecked Henry, but then lost all sympathy for him when he bullied his wife.

There's also a surprisingly clever ending, when the toon appears to end with a typical iris-in, but one more unexpected gag completely changes the fates of all the characters. And there's some really superb scoring here by Sharples; at one point, when Herman whispers a scheme to Henry (so we can't hear it), Sharples's staccato music substitutes for Herman's voice. Sharples scores the whole cartoon very imaginatively and effectively. 'The Henpecked Rooster' is quite misogynist (certainly not the only cartoon to be guilty of that trait) but it's much better than I expected, and I'll rate it 8 out of 10.