Hello, friends! Enemies, even! Get in here, all of you!

So I’ll preface this by saying what I always say in these posts: sorry for the inactivity. For the longest time, I’ve really had no idea what I want this blog to be, but I think at long last I have some concrete idea. It’s always been an afterthought, I’m a busy guy, but I think I will at long last be rectifying that– and yes, that includes posting my long-delayed 2021 Reading post (think I’ll just be combining it with my 2022 Reading post by this point). When will this take hold? I… dunno! But soon enough. Like I said: busy.

In the meantime, here’s a bit of a low-effort, but nonetheless fun, post to stall for time.

As of late, I’ve been revisiting the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts, back when he had more of this pranksterish, troublemaking imp vibe about him. As we all know, that was eventually toned down in favour of making him a Nice And Cute Guy– this is generally credited to the fact that Uncle Walt and Co. wanted to make the Mouse as marketable as possible. There is lots of truth to that explanation, to be sure, but to their credit I feel there is an equally-as-prominent reason to Mickey’s change that gets largely overlooked. Yesterday, I read through Joshua Glenn’s excellent series of Articles, “Taking The Mickey”, that pays tribute to and analyzes Disney’s star character and his changes throughout the years. I’d highly recommend you read those articles when you get a moment, engrossing stuff, that articulates and gets into what I’m getting at here in much more depth than I will right now. But this 1953 quote from the big man himself, Walt Disney, really stuck with me:

“Mickey’s our problem child. He’s so much of an institution that we’re limited in what we can do with him. If we have Mickey kicking someone in the pants we get a million letters from mothers telling us we’re giving their kids the wrong ideas. Mickey must always be sweet, always lovable. What can you do with such a leading man?”

Walt Disney

There you have it.

But I digress! Let’s take a look back to Mickey’s early years, when he was allowed to be more of a hell-raising bastard than most people, I think, are aware of. In animation circles, and pop culture discussions in general, one oft-trodden topic is whether or not Mickey Mouse is a good character, whether he’s “over-rated”, etc. Mickey is, in fact, a great character– and his generally overlooked 1920s-30s run of cartoons is the proof. He was a lot of fun, and the whole reason he rose to such fame where it necessitated his personality being watered-down as he was now such an American Institution, is ironically the proof of that: he wouldn’t have become such a big, popular character if those early shorts weren’t such a blast. And I don’t think that him eventually becoming a blander leading man who, comedically, took a backseat to his co-stars (Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto) takes away from how funny and charming he once was. You can’t undo that. You can certainly try, and they arguably have, but those shorts still exist; therefore Mickey is still a great character in that sense.

Today I was watching the 1929 Mickey ‘toon “The Plowboy”– not on Disney-Plus, (at least not here in Canada), which is odd because there are no problematic elements to it or anything of that sort. This entire era of Mickey is criminally under-represented on the streaming service, which makes no sense to me, because very little in that run of shorts has aged all that poorly. Gags based on racism and the like that were more common in first half 20th century cartoons aren’t super common in the Mickey series. They’re there, to be sure, but there are more than enough that don’t have any that could fill up Disney-Plus’ library.

Since it’s not on Disney-Plus, you can watch it in full on YouTube by clicking this link here.

Someday, maybe I’ll get to write about my love of this “rubber hose” era of animation. I’d certainly love to do that on here. In the meantime, here are a few lovely wacky drawings from the short, for your viewing pleasure. Walt Disney directed this one, and Ub Iwerks drew every single frame of this short (as well as most of the earliest Mickey shorts)– a true master! Speaking as someone currently drawing every frame of a cartoon for my thesis film at Sheridan, I just gotta tip my hat to the guy. It’s a labor of love, but a nightmare at times. Hoping he wills me some of his stamina from Cartoonist Heaven, if he sees this.

This is one of my favourite drawings ever of Mickey and Minnie. I love this look on them. How their eyes appeared was rather malleable in the earliest cartoons, which makes sense as they were still figuring things out. That kind of experimentation has always appealed to me.