Disney mascot that reaches all corners
of the world
By Maharaj K. Koul

MICKEY Mouse, the animated rodent in short pants, known as one of the century’s top pop icons and an enduring source of revenue for US entertainment giant Disney, turned 70 recently.

Hench John, the official portrait artist of Mickey Mouse, first immortalised the Mouse on canvas in 1953 for Mickey’s 25th birthday. Mickey Mouse was born on November 18, 1928 in a cartoon entitled ‘Steamboat Willie’ in which his creator, Walt Disney, also provided his voice. Disney once described Mickey Mouse as "a little fellow trying to do the best he could".

For a rodent, already 70, Mickey Mouse shows no sign of easing up. He is out there every day, adorning a million school lunch boxes, smiling amicably from the corporate masthead, pumping hands at theme parks on three continents.

George V and Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly refused to go to the cinema unless a Mickey shot was on the programme. Doff your trilby, Frank Sinatra; take a back seat Bob Hope. The greatest star of them all, progenitor of Hollywood’s mightiest empire, is alive and kicking. It is the old, old problem — he might not be quite so geriatric but his target audience is a lot younger — and at 70, the fans just do not know who Mickey Mouse is any more.

That, at least, is the verdict of Andreas Deja, supervising animator of ‘Runaway Brain’, the first straightforward Mickey Mouse cartoon to be made in 42 years. The seven-minute short — the classic cartoon format — will run alongside Disney’s new live-action children’s film ‘A Kid in King Arthur’s Court’.

It is not that the Disney archetype has been forgotten. Put on a pair of big round black ears anywhere in the world and the punters from pint size to octogenarian, instantly recognise Mickey. He has become a synonym for mouse in almost every language. His cheery, grinning mug shot is a jealously guarded trademark. As anyone who has been in litigation with Disney knows, the word to the wise is: "Do not mess with the mouse". Even Chinese comic book publishers have been successfully sued to trying to ape him.

It is faintly ironic that Dengist China’s programme of market-driven reform should have flooded the traditionally xenophobic Middle Kingdom with all manner of foreign cultural inputs. Much to the chagrin of the very policy makers who are responsible for this state of affairs. American culture seems to have summarily displaced Confucian traditionalism among China’s younger generation.

Walt Disney comics, for instance, have captured a large share of the market. Up to 1,80,000 copies of Mickey Mouse or "Mi Laoshu" as he is known in his Han avtaar, are sold in China each month. Hundreds of thousands of kids also have cajoled their parents into buying Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Toy Story’ comics after seeing the films. The Disney operation finds an eager and expanding audience among China’s "little emperors", the children of parents who have grown rich through Deng Xiaoping’s programme of economic reforms.

When the Disney empire first strayed beyond Hollywood into the wider world of entertainment with the opening of the original Disneyland in California back in 1955, Mickey was as much a part of the package as "Sleeping Beauty’s" plastic palace. Today it is with the theme parks that he remains most immediately associated. Which may not have helped his image. More modern children relate to Mickey, not as a tiny, two-dimensional cartoon mouse, but as a 5-footer in a singularly unanimated mouse costume who wanders around a theme park waving in total silence and patting them aggravatingly on the head.

Mickey somehow belongs to a past generation. But while his icon status may have made him a suitable motif for 1980s T-shirts and mini dresses, it has contributed to his aura as yesterday’s mouse. For today’s kids, still addicted to the enduring mainstays of British comic-book tradition, "Beano" and "Dandy", Mickey is on a par with those other stalwarts of the 1950s, "Korky the Kat" and "Biffo the Bear" — not quite consigned to oblivion but definitely no longer frontpage material.

According to Disney legend, and few are more carefully preserved, Mickey was born out of a few of Walt Disney’s doodles on a trip from Manhattan to Los Angeles in March 1928 in a state of dire disillusion about the studio hijacking of his earlier cartoon hero "Ostwald, the Lucky Rabbit". Walt wanted to call him "Mortimer". His wife, Lillian, thought that too pompous and insisted on Mickey. But fate decreed that his invention should have coincided with that of the movie soundtrack. ‘Steamboat Willie" was a squawky-talkie that took Mickey to stardom using Walt’s own voice. It was an overnight success, recouping its creator’s debts and securing his future fortune.

With hindsight, it would seem to have been at least Disney’s subconscious that made the mouse almost a cartoon clone of the star of the first cinema talkie (then recently released) The Jazz Singer. Mickey, black with his big white eyes, was Al Jolson to a T, even before he added the white gloves and ‘tuxedo’. Ironically, though, if Mickey began life in danger of developing into an offensive black-and-white minstrel, the character that developed is possibly the only classic Disney figure capable of crossing the race barrier with street credibility. It is impossible to imagine "Snow White" or "Bambi" saying. "Yo, give me high five". But not Mickey. In 1997, he even featured on a rap album.

Over the decades, however, Mickey’s biggest problem has been the lack of any obvious role beyond that of Disney mascot. Mickey was the ubiquitous bit player in the Disney cast list, without even, Donald Duck’s instantly identifiable irascible quack. His last attempt at a comeback was as "Bob Cratchit" in an unsatisfactory 1983 version of Charles Dickens’s ‘Christmas Carol’, but he was overshadowed by the other characters.

Ironically, his greatest role was a real slow burner. Disney released Fantasia back in 1941, with Mickey as the sorcerer’s apprentice conjuring up a fantasy world of animation that ranged from the hilarious to the almost scary with dancing elephants, broomsticks and great celestial sweeps all in time to a magnificent score of popular classical music. It was a box-office flop, and production work on ‘Dumbo’ — which pinched some of the pink elephants — had to be speeded up to recoup the losses. A quarter of a century later, Fantasia was rediscovered — to Disney’s moral horror but financial gain — by the LSD generation. It has since been released on video and is today widely regarded as Walt’s masterpiece.

In 1995, Mickey finally caught up with the world of computers, specially reanimated in digital technology for ‘Sega’ and ‘Nintendo’ in ‘Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse’. But Disney’s attempts to keep Mickey up to date have had to march in step with his squeaky-clean image, designed to reflect the wholesomeness of the corporation itself.

Now, Mickey Mouse is to make a comeback. Disney’s chirpy mascot, who first became a star alongside Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, is to be updated for the first time in 40 years and recast as a harassed "Nineties man".

A series of 60 new stories will introduce the adventures of Mickey and his friends, "Goofy", "Pluto" and "Daisy", to a generation of children for whom the ageing cartoons come a poor second to action video games. He will be presented as a creature of the modern age with more "attitude" but one also baffled by the rise of feminism and advanced technology. His girl friend "Minnie" will be a career woman while his friends use high-technology gadgets to spruce up their pranks.

The revamp is being overseen by Roy Disney, son of Walt Disney, and coincides with attempts by Universal, a Hollywood studio, to reinvent "Woody Woodpecker", another ageing cartoon. The reborn characters will be aired on television and in the cinema in 1999.

New Mickey still has a pair of giant black ears, but has been forced to trim the can-do-attitude that made him, with "Donald Duck", a symbol of American patriotism during World War II. Meanwhile, "Goofy" has swapped his bicycle for a jetski and snowboard.

Roberts Gannaway, the Executive Producer in charge of Mickey’s comeback says the new characters will have a cooler image. "They will remain friendly, but our focus groups told us that they did not have enough attitude. These characters were born in the Great Depression, and were imbued with a simple optimistic outlook, which now looks outdated. There may be less need to modernise Warner characters who already had a more aggressive outlook when they became popular during the war," says Gannaway.

At 70, Mickey finds his long-term romance with Minnie Mouse come under strain as he wrestles with the problems of being a "nineties man". Gannaway says:" Walt Disney did not feel people would laugh at the mishaps of a female character. We have addressed that by putting Minnie into a leadership role, but without taking it too far".

A series of short cartoons has been created to appeal to children with a low attention span. "Donald Duck" appears in a running gag in which he has only 90 seconds to defuse a bomb. Disney has avoided a makeover of Mickey’s appearance because he will continue to perform his other role as a company mascot. He still carries the obligation, decreed by Walt Disney, to dedicate himself to "the ideals, dreams and struggle that made America".

The mighty Disney Corporation is growing uneasy with the passing of the years. The little guy is getting older. They know that nothing lasts for ever, that one day the sad, but inevitable, moment will come. That Mickey Mouse will pass on. Or rather out. Of copyright, that is.

That moment is getting uncomfortably close. American copyrights act lasts for 75 years: Mickey Mouse has just 5 more years as the sole property of Disney. But even as the candles were lit on Mickey’s 70th birthday cake a billion-dollar rescue plan is being hatched to persuade Washington to give Disney and its favourite son a few more years together. A Bill to extend the American copyright by 20 years is currently before the Congress.

Disney knows only too well the value of a work out of copyright. Its cartoon studies have ruthlessly exploited everything from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’, through ‘Winnie the Pooh’, and the legend of ‘Hercules’, without paying a penny in fees. As things stand the first Mickey Mouse cartoon will slip from the Disney empire in 2003. The first cartoon ‘Plane Crazy’ which also featured Minnie, premiered on Sunset Boulevard in May, 1928. Disney had released ‘Steamboat Willie’, the world’s first synchronised talking cartoon, with Mickey’s now familiar flutting falsetto provided by Uncle Walt himself. Three days later after the New York premiere in November, Disney copyrighted the film.

Months earlier Walt Disney had already registered Mickey Mouse as a trademark. Disney saw the value of his creation far beyond the flickering black and white images on the movie screens.

Ever since the League of Nations presented Mickey Mouse with a gold medal as "a universal symbol of goodwill" in 1935, he has become Disney’s ambassador to the world.

Michael Eisner, Chairman of Disney, on being told that images of Mickey Mouse on maternity ward walls had a calming influence on new born babies is said to have replied: "Imagine what would happen if this great power were not harnessed to good". Others take a less philanthropic view of the company’s motives. "Disney’s strategy has been to promote the mouse as an image of the company,’’ says Dr John Willey, a professor of intellectual property at the University of California Law School.

The trademark theory is that people associate the mouse with Disney, just as people associate the golden arches with McDonalds. Either way, Disney has every reason to fear a new and unauthorised generation of Mickeys. But should ‘Steamboat Willie’ slip from copyright, then the Disney nightmare will only be beginning.

For the next 15 years almost every one of what the company likes to call its "classic"characters will enter the public domain. "Pluto" in 2006. "Goofy" in 2008, then "Donald Duck" and his nephews "Huey", "Dewey" and "Louie". After that, things will get worse.