Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse

The Evolution, The Legend, The Phenomenon!

by Robert Heide and John Gilman, et al.

Disney, 192 pp., $35

The Disney Treasures

by Robert Tieman

Disney, 64 pp. with audio CD, $60

MICKEY MOUSE turned seventy-five this year–although you’d hardly know it from the studied lack of attention the Disney corporation has granted the occasion. Mickey was born at a brutal meeting in New York in March 1928, when a Universal Pictures executive muscled Walt Disney out of a contract for a modestly successful series called “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.” Disney needed a fresh idea quickly–and, according to the legend, came up at least partially with the idea of the mouse on the long train trip back to his studio in Los Angeles.

In fact, Disney was almost destined to pick a mouse for his new project. Animated cartoon protagonists in 1928 were invariably cuddly, furry animals. Rabbits and cats were already spoken for, thanks to Oswald and Felix the Cat. But mice were available for a starring role, although they had played minor parts in such 1920s work as Paul Terry’s “Farmer Al Falfa” cartoons, the “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” films, and an earlier Disney series, the “Alice Comedies.” Disney later claimed that Mickey stemmed from his fondness for a mouse that kept him company while he worked–a tale that reeks of revisionist history. But a handmade birthday card adorned with what would prove cartoon prototypes of the early Mickey, given by Disney to his father in 1926, confirms a genuine affinity on his part.

Mickey Mouse made his debut on a Sunday afternoon, November 18, 1928, at Manhattan’s Colony Theatre on 53rd Street and Broadway. The six-minute one-reeler, “Steamboat Willie,” appeared on a bill that boasted music by Ben Bernie and His Famous Orchestra, live stage acts, and a Pathé newsreel with sound. In its New York Times ad, the Colony Theatre touted “Steamboat Willie” as the “FIRST and ONLY synchronized-sound animated cartoon comedy.” The nominal highlight of the day was a now-forgotten feature film called “Gang War,” with Olive Borden and Jack Pickford, the brother of America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford.

In his review the next day, the Times critic Mordaunt Hall called the Borden-Pickford film “better than the majority of its ilk.” But Hall swooned over the mouse: “On the same program is the first sound cartoon, produced by Walter Disney, creator of ‘Oswald the Rabbit.’ This current film is called ‘Steamboat Willie,’ and it introduces a new cartoon character, henceforth to be known as ‘Micky Mouse’ [sic]. It is an ingenious piece of work with a good deal of fun. It growls, whines, squeaks and makes various other sounds that add to its mirthful quality.” Disney’s pint-sized hero was an immediate hit, and for years thereafter the New York Times was one of Disney’s biggest boosters. (Between 1934 and 1937, Mickey Mouse rated three pieces in the Times’s Sunday magazine, one of them illustrated by Al Hirschfeld.)

But Mickey at the beginning was not as anodyne as he later became. He was a scamp who pressed a sow’s teats to make music in “Steamboat Willie” and put unwanted moves on Minnie in “Plane Crazy” (also 1928). And unlike the snobs of today, seventy years ago the intelligentsia idolized Walt Disney and his frisky alter ego. In the first highbrow analysis of the mouse, “Mickey and Minnie,” published in the Spectator in 1934, E.M. Forster lauded “a scandalous element” in the character that “I find most restful.” Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and pop-culture maven Gilbert Seldes also were public in their praise.

IN THE 1930S, Mickey began to crop up in popular songs like Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” (You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, / You’re Mickey Mouse) and films like “Bringing Up Baby” (when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are mistaken for bank robbers and ordered to name their accomplices, Grant retorts: “Mickey-the-Mouse and Donald-the-Duck”). In 1932 Thomas Hart Benton inserted the mouse in a set of murals painted for the library of the Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan (when the Whitney moved uptown the panels wound up at the New Britain Museum of American Art). In 1933, a display of Mickey and other Disney animation art at New York’s Kennedy Galleries was transformed by the College Art Association into a show that began a national tour at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was feted at a gala soirée presided over by two of the town’s grandest dames, Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Chauncey McCormick. Disney-and-Mickey exhibitions were seen at the Toledo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Los Angeles County museums, among other venues.

Mickey Mouse has touched America in myriad ways since his inception. Children gobbled up anything with his or Minnie’s face on it, from school supplies and plush toys to sweets and milk. During the Depression, he almost singlehandedly saved Lionel Trains and Ingersoll-Waterbury from bankruptcy, with the Mickey-and-Minnie handcar and Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Mickey and his maker may have been responsible at this time for the rise of the modern phenomenon of year-round marketing aimed at kids. In 1944, “Mickey Mouse” was the password for the Normandy invasion.

After World War II, Mickey reentered high art, starting in 1948 with a satirical collage by Eduardo Paolozzi. But it was the Pop artists (notably Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol) who established him as a common motif in contemporary art, inspiring the likes of Keith Haring, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Sandle, Enrique Chagoya, Takashi Murakami, Joyce Pensato, and Philip Pearlstein to follow suit. One might add that as a boy Kurt Cobain was fond of drawing Mickey, and once, when photo-realist Chuck Close had to convince some kids that he was a “real” artist, he dashed off a picture of the mouse. By the millions, Americans invoke his beneficent powers by donning Mickey T-shirts and trekking to Orlando for an obligatory pose with the mouse.

IN LIGHT OF ALL THIS, what is the Disney corporation doing on the diamond jubilee of its founder’s signature character? Not much, it turns out. Rumor has it that the company doesn’t want to make a fuss, fearing that kids will perceive the rodent as long in the tooth. Over the years, he has been accused of many things (the movie critic Richard Schickel once ranted in a letter to the editor of Playboy: “If fascism ever comes to America, it will probably be wearing mouse ears”). But now, apparently, Mickey Mouse is a victim of ageism–by his own minders.

Fortunately, for those who wish to toast the übermaus of cartoondom, two DVD compilations and a pair of books are at hand. The anthologies offer a generous sampling of films from Mickey’s first decade, many of them long forgotten or unavailable on VHS. “Mickey Mouse in Black and White” contains thirty-four of Mickey’s seventy-four cartoons from 1928 to 1935, all of which are still funny. One revelation of the pre-color films is Disney’s imaginative use of song. In fact, a detailed review of Disney shorts from 1928 through the mid-1930s (when orchestrations started to rely on staff-written melodies) would reveal an extremely broad cross-section of American popular music, from traditional ballads, patriotic anthems and minstrelsy to vaudeville, ragtime, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley compositions–with a dash of classical to boot.

“Mickey’s Follies” (1929) is basically plotless, just a barnyard revue with fare as varied as “Swanee River,” a rooster and hen doing an Apache dance, and a sow singing “O Solo Mio.” In “The Gorilla Mystery” (1930) Minnie sings and plays on the piano a now tender, now wildly syncopated treatment of the Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael tune “All Alone (By the Telephone).” In “Mickey Cuts Up” (1931), the action kicks off with the mouse rhythmically mowing the lawn to “Shine,” a number previously recorded by Louis Armstrong and reprised, a decade later, by Dooley Wilson in “Casablanca.”

“The Birthday Party” (1931) is one of Walt Disney’s most delightful unions of art and music. A surprise shindig for Mickey is a pretext for non-stop song and dance, starting with Mickey and Minnie in a dueling-piano version of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” (a hit from 1928 that resurfaced a decade later in “Bringing Up Baby”). Next, Mickey, Minnie, and friends do the Charleston to the “Darktown Strutters Ball,” and then Mickey gives a soulful rendition of “Home, Sweet Home” on the xylophone. The climax is a rousing version of “Muskrat Ramble,” in which the mouse tickles the ivories with his fanny.

THE DVD SET “Mickey Mouse in Living Color” showcases all twenty-six Technicolor shorts from 1935 to 1938, including the first and possibly finest: “The Band Concert,” featuring Mickey as a Music Man, in a baggy uniform, who conducts six barnyard amateurs in an outdoor program of classical fare. Disney’s mastery of color shows clearly. The saturated hues of the band costumes are enhanced by the soft pastoral background drawing and Mickey’s face and gloved hands, which retain their crisp black-and-white purity, contrast superbly with his crimson suit festooned with lush green trim, gold braid, and buttons.

Donald Duck–in a turn that made him an overnight star–appears early on as a vendor hawking snacks. As the players tackle the “William Tell Overture,” the irascible bird determines to steal the show by pulling out a fife and playing “Turkey in the Straw.” Mickey perseveres, however, snatching and breaking the instrument in two–although Donald, it turns out, has a boundless supply up his sleeve. As the musicians heave into the “Storm” movement, a tornado arrives and the crowd runs for cover. Oblivious to the turmoil, the band plays on, lifted up and transported acrobatically through an aerial obstacle course of chairs, a farmhouse, and diverse debris, before it is deposited safely back on terra firma. But no one is left to witness the group’s tenacity and the duck has the last laugh when he pipes one final riff on his fife.

“The Band Concert” caused Gilbert Seldes to write:

A second highlight in this compilation is “Lonesome Ghosts” (1937), which inspired the 1984 Hollywood comedy “Ghostbusters.” By the late 1930s, however, Mickey was much tamer than he had been a just few years before–and more manic cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny began to eclipse him at the box office.

In a few weeks, a second Disney DVD set will be released: “Mickey Mouse in Living Color (Part 2),” featuring all twenty-one color shorts from 1939 to 1953 (the thirty-year drought of Mickey Mouse cartoons began in 1953). It can only be hoped that the remaining black-and-white cartoons will be released, too, among them, one of Forster’s favorites: “Mickey in Arabia,” wherein the mouse and his paramour, in Forster’s words, “strolled with their kodaks through an oriental bazaar, snapping this and that, while their camel drank beer and galloped off on both its humps across the desert.”

Mickey Mouse was always a means toward an end for Disney. That was clearly the case in his role as the sorcerer’s apprentice in the ambitious 1940 melange of art and music, “Fantasia” (also now on DVD). “Fantasia” lost money because many foreign markets were cut off during World War II, and after the war, Mickey was finished on the movie screen. But his career revived when the “Mickey Mouse Club” television show, with its famous Mouseketeers, was launched in 1955. Disneyland was inaugurated in 1955 as well, and it has largely been via the Mouseketeers in their various permutations and the theme parks that Mickey’s loaded sociocultural image has remained embedded in our lives.

AS A COMPLEMENT to Mickey’s film career, now accessible on DVD, two books from Disney give a taste of his multiple transformations and critical fortunes over the past seventy-five years–even though, like most Disney publications, they are more satisfying pictorially than textually. Robert Heide and John Gilman’s “Mickey Mouse: The Evolution, The Legend, The Phenomenon!” is full of illustrations ranging from storyboard art for “Steamboat Willie” to movie posters, memorabilia, and ads for Mouseketeer ears. Short on original research, its brief, readable text follows the company line of wholesomeness and good cheer–with no mention of Seldes or Forster, much less the way Mickey has become a standard trope for the evils of America.

THE STUDIO’S VAST STOREHOUSE of original art, archival materials, and merchandising tie-ins has been exploited more impressively in “The Disney Treasures” by Robert Tieman, manager of the Walt Disney Archives. Although just sixty-four pages long and devoted to the entirety of Walt Disney’s life and career, it’s full of mouse-related photos and pop-out and pullout memorabilia–including facsimile reproductions of a theater program from the maiden run of “Steamboat Willie” in New York, Mickey’s first color comic strip from 1932, a children’s magazine from 1935 distributed by dairies around the country, and an audio CD with a folksy eleven-minute track of Walt Disney recounting “The Story of Mickey Mouse” for Mickey’s twentieth birthday.

These books will appeal mainly to Disney freaks or nostalgia buffs. But there are aspects of Mickey’s story that officially sanctioned historiographers cannot confront. Naturally, Walt Disney’s figure lends itself to visual parody. He has been spoofed in the New Yorker (and on its cover by Saul Steinberg as a malevolent emblem of “Amerika”), mocked in Mad magazine as “Mickey Rodent” and as Mickey’s “evil twin,” Rat Fink, by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

Then, too, Mickey has been flogged for over thirty years as a symbol of American cultural and military imperialism. “One of the most disastrous cultural influences ever to hit America,” is how James Michener characterized him in 1968. Last spring, Kurt Vonnegut decried the Republicans “who have taken over our federal government, and hence the world, by means of a Mickey Mouse coup d’état.” Such cant is echoed in a cartoon by Robert Grossman from 1967, depicting a chipper Ronald Reagan as Mickey Mouse–neither of whom, one may suppose, would mind the visual simile. After all, Reagan cohosted the televised opening of Disneyland, and Walt Disney was a staunch Goldwater Republican.

The unprecedented extent to which Mickey has permeated our culture reflects the dizzying ascent of movies, cartoons, and other forms of popular entertainment that Gilbert Seldes called the “lively arts.” As Alfred Eckes and Thomas Zeiler point out in their new book, “Globalization and the American Century,” by the late 1930s Hollywood accounted for “over 70 percent of the world’s screen time,” leading Variety to claim that American films were the “subtlest and most efficient form of propaganda any nation has ever had at its command.” Eckes and Zeiler add that Disney’s cartoons, and Mickey Mouse in particular, were “perhaps the most successful American film exports in the 1930s.”

At the close of his caustic biography, “The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney” (1968), Richard Schickel especially stressed Disney’s “significance as a primary force in the expression and formulation of the American mass consciousness.”

The Disney vision of America was not without its failings–rank sentimentality, crass commercialism, and so forth. But, in Schickel’s view, Disney’s flaws were those of an entire country, and they were balanced by virtues that he shared with his compatriots: “his individualism, his will to survive, his appreciation of the possibilities inherent in technological progress, despite the bad odor it gives off today. . . . It is culturally blind not to see that Disney was a forceful and, in his special way, imaginative worker in this, our only great tradition. . . . The industrial and entrepreneurial tradition that both moved and sheltered him was neither more nor less flawed than he was.”

If any single product of Disney’s dream factory embodies his vision, it is his iconic little mouse.

Of course, to be truly “iconic” requires more than mere celebrity or invasive familiarity. The word itself comes from the term for standardized portraits of sacred figures in Greek Orthodox art. Even today, properly employed, it suggests something touched by a vital spark that provides comfort and meaningful connectedness. Such hallowed figures inevitably invite derision as well as approbation. Disney’s protean creation continues to captivate the masses–and provoke the creative mind–in part because Mickey Mouse personifies the drive, optimism, and relentless quest for happiness that are core traits of America. Besides, he was funny.

Garry Apgar is coauthor of “The Newspaper in Art” and is working on a book about Mickey Mouse as a cultural icon.