Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right.
Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer.
After finding this via a Google search, “movie with mouse needing to find fever medicine reddit”, I decided to check whether any of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini could come up with an answer. They all failed in similar ways, though Gemini ended up being helpful despite not finding the correct answer.
I wrote the same prompt to all three of them: “I’m thinking of a movie where a mouse needs to find fever medicine to save a boy who is sick in bed.”
Claude suggested The Rescuers Down Under, and invented a scene that didn’t exist to match my description. When I told it about its error, and clarified that the movie I wanted was not animated, it suggested Mousehunt, which it did mention has no scene specifically matching what I wrote in.
Gemini initally suggested The Rescuers, with more complete information including scenes that plausibly match the kind of scene I was describing but without the specifics. “There’s a scene where Bernard needs to find a specific item (a diamond) to bribe a cat guard. This might be getting mixed up with the medicine element you remember.” I thought that was clever. When I followed up, it didn’t give any other movies. Instead, it gave me suggestions for what search terms I could try, and specifically mentioned using either the Tip of My Tongue subreddit, or the IMDB forums. That’s a decent failure experience.
ChatGPT was the worst at this. It confidently stated “The movie you’re referring to is The Secret of NIMH.” While the other two assistants gave wiggle room in their answers, ChatGPT assumed it was correct. Its second guess was one called The Witches, in which a boy gets turned into a mouse.
I found this illuminating. These assistants are getting better, and I’m becoming more willing to use them, but they still have blindspots and should be considered, at best, a jumping-off point.
But also, The Mouse and the Motorcycle is killer based on my memory of it from twenty years ago.