The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (2 page)

More significantly, I wanted to clarify some of the many Mickey Mouse myths that have been told and re-told for decades.

“Mickey Mouse” was not the code word to launch the D-Day invasion but it was connected to that event. Mickey’s first words were not “Hot Dogs!” plural as it is authoritatively posted so many places but “Hot Dog!” singular. Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse were not given a special award in 1935 from the League of Nations. The stories behind those stories are in this book along with hundreds of others.

Over the decades, many fine authors have tried to chronicle the complete tale of Walt’s alter ego, but the elusive mouse easily slips away, leaving behind huge holes in the narrative like a wheel of Swiss Cheese.

I admit that I am as frustrated as some readers picking up this book to see some of those same missing pieces in this attempt.

Where is the story about Mickey’s long career in comic books? Where is the listing of Mickey in videogames? Where is the complete story of Mickey’s European merchandise?

I can only helplessly point to the many stacks of pages containing some of those tales surrounding my feet like so many crumbs of discarded cheese. Despite my best efforts, these stories could not be crammed into the limited confines of this book or they needed more access to certain research before they could be properly documented.

Even though I have included many additional pages of quotes and anecdotes as well as extra notes in the filmography to try and fill a few of those holes, it is clear that there is still enough information about Mickey Mouse left over for another book at least.

However, there is plenty of material to enjoy in the following pages of this book that has never been set down in print before or, at least, never with this particular perspective and documentation.

The book is subtitled “A Celebration of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse” for a specific reason. Arguably, Mickey Mouse was Walt’s finest achievement. Most definitely, the early Mickey Mouse, in particular, was a reflection and extension of Walt Disney. Most of the stories in this book center on that special time that Walt and Mickey shared together.

Walt Disney still lives on today in the character of Mickey Mouse and I felt it appropriate that the final chapter is composed of Walt talking about Mickey.

Writing is hard. It can get lonely. It can get frustrating. It can even get scary when you stare at the blank whiteness of a page and have no clue where to start.

However, every day I worked on this book I loved it. It was always fun to research Mickey Mouse, re-watch all the cartoons, re-read the books and magazines, correspond with other authorities, and literally surround myself with stacks and stacks of Mickey material as if they were treasures in Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin. I hope that readers will find some of that same joy when they stumble across some of the things they discover book.

As always, I have tried to convey the information in bite-size tasty appetizers rather than a heavy multi-course meal. I am not telling Mickey’s story in a chronological fashion so feel free to scamper to those topics that interest you without feeling the need to read the whole book from beginning to end.

I have done my best to verify and re-verify the information included in this book but there is always more to be discovered about the story and some of those items will probably only be uncovered after this book is in print.

I hope that we never forget what Walt Disney once memorably said on October 27, 1954: “It was all started by a mouse.”

Or more accurately, a man and his mouse. This is their story.

Disney’s copyrighted character Mickey Mouse is perhaps the most universally known and loved cartoon character in the world. For generations, children and adults alike have been entertained by Mickey Mouse, who has appeared in hundreds of Disney animated motion pictures, television shows, video cassettes, comics, books, and in various other media. Indeed, the Mickey Mouse character identifies and symbolizes Disney itself.

— How the Disney Company described its star, Mickey Mouse, for the copyright infringement case
Walt Disney Company v. Transatlantic Video Inc., U.S.D.C.
, Central District of Ca., Case No. CV-91-0429 (1991).

Mickey Mouse is a universally recognized character and icon who has represented Walt Disney and the Disney Company for over eight decades.

While he physically resembles a three-foot-tall black mouse, spiritually he is a clever and appealing young boy created by Walt Disney in 1928.

Mickey’s instantaneous popularity was due to numerous factors, including the artistic skill of Ub Iwerks, the storytelling ability of Walt Disney, the novelty of sound on film, and the perfect timing of his appearance as a scrappy “everyman” whose indomitable spirit and good humor overcame all challenges at the beginning of the Great Depression.

In addition to being a popular animated cartoon star both in films and on television, Mickey was a significant part of a multitude of different areas from merchandise to music to theme parks to comics to just about everything imaginable. He is a unique pop culture phenomenon embraced by audiences of all ages around the world.

Mickey Mouse was very much a direct reflection of his creator. They both shared the same philosophy of life and transitioned at the same time from a rural background into a more sophisticated Hollywood environment. Walt was the original voice for the character and the acknowledged “keeper of the Mouse” when it came to decisions about him.

Mickey Mouse celebrated his 85th birthday on November 18, 2013.

The exact details about the creation of Mickey Mouse have always been unclear because Walt Disney told different versions of how it happened. The most common is some variation on this story:

Walt Disney went to New York to renew his contract and ask his film distribu includingharles Mintz, for more money to produce the second series of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons that had become very popular.

Mintz offered less money because he was setting up his own animation studio to produce the cartoons cheaper using Walt’s own staff, whom he had secretly hired away. Only animator Ub Iwerks and two apprentice animators refused Mintz’s tempting offer.

Walt had no recourse. The Oswald character and animated cartoons were copyrighted by Universal Pictures and they had hired Mintz to oversee the series. Contrary to stories that the character was “stolen” from Walt even though he had created the design for the character, wrote the stories, and produced the animation, Walt was aware he had no legal rights, only an ethical commitment he felt was being dishonored.

Walt telegraphed his anxious brother Roy back in Hollywood that everything was fine and that Walt would explain when he arrived back in Los Angeles.

He boarded the train to Los Angeles on March 13, 1928.

In an interview with Tony Thomas in 1959, Walt said:

So I had to get a new character. And I was coming back after this meeting in New York, and Mrs. Disney was with me, and it was on the train — in those days, you know, it was three days over, three days from New York… well, I’d fooled around a lot with little mice, and they were always cute characters, and they hadn’t been overdone in the picture field. They’d been used but never featured. So, well, I decided it would be a mouse… Well, that’s how it came about… I had [his name] “Mortimer” first and my wife shook her head, and then I tried “Mickey” and she nodded the other way and that was it.

Walt’s wife Lillian told Don Eddy in the August 1955 issue of
The American Magazine
:

He was a raging lion on the train coming home… All he could say, over and over, was that he’d never work for anyone again as long as he lived. He’d be his own boss… I was in a state of shock, scared to death. He read the script [for
Plane Crazy
] to me, but I couldn’t focus on it. I was too upset. The only thing that got through to me was that horrible name, Mortimer.

Horrible for a mouse, at least. [Lillian actually told Walt it was a “sissy” name.] When I blew up, Walt calmed down. After a while, he asked quietly, “What would you think of Mickey? Mickey Mouse?” I said it sounded better than “Mortimer” and that’s how Mickey was born.

Later, Walt would embellish the tale with the apocryphal story of him befriending a mouse in his Kansas City studio, sketching him, training him, and then letting him go “in the best neighborhood I could find” before he made his trip to Hollywood to seek his fortune.

Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney, in an interview with Bob Thomas in 1988, remarked:

[The train story] has been told so many times that you don’t know what’s true. The name part I’m sure of. I often heard my father and Walt say, “Thank God we didn’t name him Mortimer!”

Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller told me that she believed her father did indeed come up with the original Mickey Mouse on the train ride:

I knew my father and traveled with him and he always had to be busy doing something. He couldn’t relax on a trip. Especially with the fate of his studio at stake, it just seems obvious to me that he played around with paper and pencil trying to come up with a solution like he usually did. He liked seeing things visually, not in the abstract. He wouldn’t have just sat there on the train worrying. He probably drew a sketch of a cartoon mouse.

In the March 1931 issue of
The American Magazine
, Walt explained:

I can’t say just how the idea came. We wanted another animal. We had had a cat; a mouse naturally came to mind. We felt that the public — especially children — like animals that are “cute” and little. I think we were rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin… a little fellow trying to do the best he could.

Did I realize that I had hit upon an idea that would go round the world? Well, we always thought every new idea was a world-beater. And usually found out that it wasn’t. We were enthusiastic over the idea of Mickey Mouse, but we had been just as enthusiastic over Alice.

The first Disney animated series was the
Alice Comedies
, featuring a live-action little girl interacting with animated characters including a black cat named Julius.

In a 1959 interview with David Griffiths, Walt elaborated:

We had to create a new character in a hurry to survive. And find a market for it. We canvassed all the animal characters we thought suitable for the movie fable fashion of the time. All the good ones — the ones that would have instant appeal and would be comparatively easy to draw — seemed to have been pre-empted by the other companies in the cartoon animal field. Finally, a mouse was suggested, debated and put on the drawing boards as the best bet. That was Mickey.

There had been plenty of mice in the
Alice Comedies
and even in the Oswald the Rabbit cartoons. The
Aesop’s Film Fables
series produced by the Van Beuren cartoon studio that Walt originally set as his standard to meet in animation, had cartoon mice, including a pair named Milton and Rita who were later re-designed to more closely resemble Mickey and Minnie by making them several feet tall and dressing them in clothes.

In 1926, Walt drew a birthday card for his father, Elias, that featured three black mice without gloves or shoes and who looked a lot like an early version of Mickey Mouse but skinnier and with longer snouts. And when Walt moved into the new Hyperion Studio, animator Hugh Harman drew a publicity poster of cartoon mice around Walt’s photo.

While Walt may have thought of a mouse character and a possible storyline on that three-day train trip, it is more likely that once he arrived in Los Angeles, he spent time with his brother, his wife, and Ub Iwerks coming up with the character.

Otto Messmer, the animator of Felix the Cat, told animation historian John Culhane that:

Walt designed a mouse but it wasn’t any good. He was long and skinny.

Flipping through humor magazines like
Life
and
Judge
, according to Iwerks, they ran across some cute mice in the drawings of cartoonist Clifton Meek. In fact, the sheet of paper with Iwerks’ earliest drawings of what Mickey would look like has the “little Lord Fauntleroy” version of Mickey in the upper-left corner, with the character attired in similar fashion to the Meek mice with a frilly white shirt and black knickers.

Essentially, Mickey Mouse was a “mouse-ified” version of Oswald the Rabbit (designed by Iwerks), with mouse ears replacing rabbit ears and with a mouse tail replacing Oswald’s small rabbit tail. Even the shorts remained the same. As Iwerks told author John Culhane:

Pear shaped body, ball on top, couple of thin legs. You gave it long ears and it was a rabbit. Short ears, it was a cat. Ears hanging down, a dog… With an elongated nose, it became a mouse.

Iwerks later told his sons, who had asked him whether he resented not getting enough credit for designing Mickey Mouse:

It was what Walt
did
with Mickey that was important, not who created him.

Disney Legend Frank Thomas, one of Walt’s fabled “Nine Old Men”, put it this way:

Ub Iwerks was responsible for the drawing of Mickey, but it was Walt Disney who supplied the soul. The way Mickey reacted to his predicaments, how he tried to extricate himself from a situation he could not control, never giving up and eventually finding a solution. That was all Walt.

According to the Disney Company, Mickey Mouse lives in Mouseton (a variation on “Houston”).

The real answer, however, is much more complicated.

In the earliest animated cartoons, Mickey lived in a rural area with farms, wide-open spaces, rustic devices, and barnyards filled with a variety of animals. In the early Mickey Mouse comic strips drawn by Floyd Gottfredson, Mickey’s hometown was called Silo Center, although this name was never used in the animated cartoons.