Original artwork, not a still
Time Enough for Love · 1973
An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A joke about bureaucracy and over-engineering. Start with a mouse, then pile on committee demands and official requirements, and you end up with something enormous and clumsy: an elephant. The humour lies in treating an entire animal as the bloated result of specifications.
Context reviewed
