It is a revival of the Mighty Mouse cartoon character. Produced by Bakshi-Hyde Ventures (a joint venture of animator Ralph Bakshi and producer John W. Hyde) and Terrytoons, it aired on CBS on Saturday mornings from fall 1987 through the 1988–89 season.
It was briefly rerun on Saturday mornings on Fox Kids in November 1992.
The quality of Mighty Mouse as compared with other 1980s animated television series is considered by animation historian Jerry Beck to "foreshadow the higher quality [animation] boom coming in the next decade."
It was one of the first Saturday morning cartoons on CBS to be broadcast in stereo
The series was a commercial half-hour format (22 minutes plus commercials), and each episode consisted of two self-contained 11-minute cartoon segments.
It differed from the earlier incarnations of Mighty Mouse in many ways. It gave Mighty Mouse the secret identity of Mike Mouse, a sidekick in the form of the orphan Scrappy Mouse (who knows the hero's secret identity), heroic colleagues such as Bat-Bat and his sidekick Tick the Bug Wonder and the League of Super-Rodents, as well as introduced antagonists like Petey Pate, Big Murray, Madame Marsupial and the Cow (actually a bull, because he is Madame Marsupial's boyfriend and he possesses male traits).
The original Mighty Mouse villain Oil Can Harry made a couple of appearances. Pearl Pureheart was not always the damsel in distress and many episodes did not feature her at all. Mighty Mouse's light-operatic singing was eliminated except for his trademark, "Here I come to save the day!", which was sometimes interrupted.
Unlike other American animated TV shows of the time (and even Mighty Mouse's past theatrical shorts) the show's format was loose and episodes did not follow a particular formula.
Kricfalusi's team wrote story outlines for 13 episodes in a week and pitched them to Price.
By the next week, Kricfalusi had hired animators he knew who had been working at other studios. They ended up hiring Jeff Pidgeon, Rich Moore, Carole Holiday, Andrew Stanton and Nate Kanfer.
Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures went into production in the month it was greenlighted; it was scheduled to premiere on September 19, 1987.
This haste required the crew to be split into four teams, led by supervising director Kricfalusi, Fitzgerald, Steve Gordon and Bruce Woodside.
Each team was given a handful of episodes and operated almost entirely independently of the others.
Although the scripts required approval by CBS executives, Kricfalusi insisted that the artists add visual gags as they drew.
Kricfalusi described Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures as the origin of the "'Creator-Driven' revolution" and that he hired artists "dissatisfied with the formula cartoons they were forced to work on at other studios" and as a "witty, satirical and wildly imaginative" series and "quite a revolution when compared to the cartoons being made everywhere else.
Kricfalusi said that he supervised the development of the cartoon in all aspects except the final editing.
Despite the time constraints, CBS was pleased with the way Bakshi Productions addressed the network's notes.
Kricfalusi did not return for the second season and took some of the crew to work on The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil for ABC.