by Charles Solomon
"Mickey Mouse, to me, is the symbol of independence. He was
a means to an end. He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20
years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time
when [the] business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at
lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner. Born of
necessity the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry.
He provided the means for expanding our organization to its present
dimensions and for expanding the medium of cartoon animation towards
new entertainment levels."
--Walt Disney
The world's most famous animated character, an international ambassador
of good will and a universally recognized corporate symbol, Mickey
Mouse has been analyzed by scientists and psychologists, praised
by writers and directors and depicted by artists in every medium.
Mickey has survived this attention with unflagging good cheer: His
smile, more famous than the Mona Lisa's, beams from the printed
page, from movie screens and televisions, and from three-dimensional
figures, including plastic toys and bronze statues.

Mickey as drawn by Walt. From the "Memories" book of
A.V. Cauger, Walt's former boss in Kansas City
Walt Disney said he did the first sketches of Mickey on the train
back to Los Angeles after the disastrous meeting with distributor
Charles Mintz in 1928, when he lost the Oswald Rabbit character.
According to the well-known story, he based the character on a mouse
he had adopted as a pet while working in a Kansas City studio. He
originally planned to call the character Mortimer, but his wife
rejected that name as too pretentious and/or sissy. This account
of Mickey's creation may be true--or it may be a good story, devised
to please fans.
"It has been told so many times that you don't know what's
true," says Roy E. Disney, the son of Walt's brother, Roy O.
Disney, and vice-chairman of The Walt Disney Company. "The
name part I'm sure of. I often heard my father and Walt say, 'Thank
God we didn't name him Mortimer!'"
Animator Ub Iwerks reworked Disney's sketches, making the new
character easier to animate, but Walt supplied his personality and,
for many years, his voice. As many of the old animators have commented,
"Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him
his soul."
Like most animated characters of the '20s, the early version of
Mickey owed a good deal to Felix the Cat, the cartoon superstar
of the silent era. Created by Otto Messmer for the Pat Sullivan
Studio, Felix made his debut in the 1919 short "Feline Follies,"
and quickly became the world's most popular animated character.
Messmer had studied the films of Charlie Chaplin for an earlier
cartoon series, and applied the knowledge he had acquired of pantomime,
gesture, and expression to his new creation. Previous cartoon characters
had been drawn as outlines, which tended to flicker at the 18 frames-per-second
projection speed of silent film; Messmer made Felix solid black,
which moved more fluidly on the screen (and recalled the dark clothes,
black hair, and white face of Chaplin's Little Tramp). After Felix's
unprecedented success, all the studios introduced solid black characters,
most of them felines. Julius the cat in Disney's "Alice"
series, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, were heavily influenced by
Felix.
Mickey was originally conceived as a silent character: The first
three films ("Plane Crazy," "The Gallopin' Gaucho,"
and "Steamboat Willie"), which Iwerks animated almost
single-handedly, were made as silents. Distributors expressed little
interest in them: Mickey seemed very similar to Oswald. Disney was
asking for $3,000 per film (a considerable sum at the time) and
insisted on retaining the rights to the Mickey Mouse character.
But Warner Brothers' "The Jazz Singer" had premiered
in October 1927, and the motion picture industry was switching from
silent to sound production. Typically, Disney was eager to explore
the possibilities of this new technology. He struck a deal with
a rather shady distributor, Pat Powers, to use the Cinephone, a
device for recording and playing film soundtracks. Carl Stalling,
a theatre organist and an old Kansas City friend of Disney's, composed
a score for "Steamboat Willie" based on the familiar songs
"Steamboat Bill" and "Turkey in the Straw."
Disney spent every cent he had on the soundtrack, and managed to
book the cartoon into the Colony Theatre in New York City for a
two-week run. "Steamboat Willie" premiered on November
18, 1928, and Mickey Mouse became an overnight sensation.
.

'Steamboat Willie' established Mickey's fame as an animated character
"Steamboat Willie" was not the first sound cartoon: Artists
at other studios had been attempting to synchronize sound and animation
since 1924. Paul Terry premiered "Dinner Time," a sound
film in his "Fables" series, a few weeks before "Steamboat
Willie." None of these earlier efforts were particularly successful:
Disney saw a preview of "Dinner Time" and dismissed it
as "terrible." Walt risked everything he had to make the
best film possible. Working without backers -- he even sold his
car to help pay for the soundtrack for "Steamboat Willie"
-- he used the new sound technology more effectively than his competitors.
The success of "Steamboat Willie" enabled Disney to
proceed with more Mickey Mouse films. Stalling prepared scores for
"The Gallopin' Gaucho" (1928) and "Plane Crazy"
(1928), and the next cartoons in the series: "The Barn Dance"
(1928), "The Opry House" (1929), and "When the Cat's
Away" (1929). Walt expanded his staff, and introduced the "Silly
Symphony" series in 1929 with "The Skeleton Dance."
Powers had originally planned to use the Mickey shorts to publicize
his Cinephone system for a year, then dump Disney. But Mickey Mouse
proved more popular than anyone had anticipated: By January 1930,
the first 12 Mickey shorts and the first six Silly Symphonies had
grossed more than $300,000, or about $17,000 per film, against costs
of $116,500, or $6,500 per film. Disney had seen very little of
this money, and Powers refused to show him the books. (During his
tenure at Universal, Powers had once thrown his ledgers out a third-story
window, rather than allow Carl Laemmle to examine them.) Powers
wanted to take over Disney's studio and offered Walt an astonishing
$2,500 per week to run it.
When Walt refused, Powers revealed he had signed Ub Iwerks to
a similar deal -- at $300 per week. Walt regarded Iwerks' departure
as a betrayal: The two men had worked together closely for 10 years,
and Iwerks owned 20% of Disney's studio -- which he sold back for
$2,920. (By the late 1990s, 20% of The Walt Disney Company would
be worth close $4 billion.) Disney signed a distribution deal with
Columbia. Iwerks produced cartoons for a decade; none of them were
particularly successful and, in 1940, he returned to work at Disney.
Mickey's popularity skyrocketed during the early '30s, and he
soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's favorite animated character.
"A Mickey Mouse cartoon" appeared on theater marquees
with the title of the feature, and "What, no Mickey Mouse?"
entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for any disappointment.
Between 1929 and 1932, more than one million children joined the
original Mickey Mouse Club. Mary Pickford, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Benito Mussolini, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and King George V of England
were all Mickey fans. Novelist E.M. Forster wrote in 1934, "Mickey
is everybody's god, so that even members of the Film Society cease
despising their fellow members when he appears." In 1935, the
League of Nations presented Disney with a gold medal declaring Mickey
"an international symbol of good will."
The Mickey Mouse comic strip debuted in January 1930, and he began
appearing in other forms. In 1929, Disney had licensed the use of
Mickey on a writing tablet; in 1930, the studio began authorizing
other Mickey Mouse merchandise. In 1932, Herman "Kay"
Kamen, a former hat salesman who had built a successful advertising
business in Kansas City, called Disney about developing character
merchandise. Walt and Roy had been unhappy with the quality of some
of the earlier merchandise and were interested in Kamen's offer.
He came to Los Angeles, a deal was struck, and the number of products
bearing Mickey's likeness expanded rapidly. Mickey appeared on everything
from a Cartier diamond bracelet ($1,250) to tin toys that sold for
less than $1. In 1933 alone, 900,000 Mickey Mouse watches and clocks
were sold, along with ten million Mickey Mouse ice cream cones.
By 1934, Disney was earning more than $600,000 a year in profits
from films and merchandise.
Not surprisingly, Mickey's extraordinary success spawned a host
of imitators. During the '30s, the Charles Mintz Studio produced
a series of "Krazy Kat" shorts in which the title character
was redesigned: With a large, round head and white gloves, Herriman's
cat resembled Disney's mouse. The mice in some of the Van Beuren
studio's cartoons, including "The Office Boy," "Stone
Age Stunts" (1930), and "College Capers" (1931),
looked so much like Mickey and Minnie that Disney took legal action
and won recognition of his ownership of the copyrighted characters.
Although Mickey Mouse may be the most immediately recognizable
figure on the planet, he exists in a variety of forms. The animated
Mickey was unlike the comic strip Mickey. Mickey the corporate symbol
and Mickey the hero of the Big Little Books were as different from
each other as they were from the animated and comic strip versions.
The various Mickeys changed over the years, but it was the animated
Mickey who changed the most.
The earliest Mickey Mouse, as animated by Iwerks, was a weightless,
blocky, rubbery scamp. When he picks up a sow and her piglets in
"Steamboat Willie," his arms stretch like rubber bands
-- and return to their proper length when he sets down his burden.
In the first films, the Disney artists gradually added many familiar
touches: Light-colored shoes replaced his square black feet in "The
Gallopin' Gaucho"; his trademark white gloves appeared in "When
the Cat's Away." He spoke for the first time in "The Karnival
Kid" (1929) and the wedge-shaped cuts in his pupils were introduced
in "The Jazz Fool" (1929). The early Mickey is also the
rowdiest: In "Plane Crazy," he pesters Minnie for a kiss
until she bails out of the airplane in annoyance.
As the Disney animators polished their skills and reworked the
character's design, Mickey was transformed into a flexible, slightly
mischievous charmer. The rounder, more appealing Mickey of "The
Band Concert" (1935, his first Technicolor short) displays
an irresistible élan that still delights audiences. The rubbery
character of 1928 has given way to a more solid, cleanly drawn figure
capable of executing the most complicated movements. His tap dance
with a deck of playing cards in "Thru the Mirror" (1936)
is performed with a stylish grace Fred Astaire might envy.
.

"A more solid, cleanly drawn figure." This is a Mickey
reference sheet for use by Disney animators, dating from 1938.
Fred Moore, whose animation of Mickey set the standard for charm
and appeal, wrote in his analysis of the character, "Mickey
seems to be the average young boy of no particular age; living in
a small town, clean-living, fun-loving, bashful around girls, polite,
and as clever as he must be for the particular story. In some pictures
he has a touch of Fred Astaire, in others of Charlie Chaplin, and
some of Douglas Fairbanks, but in all of these there should be some
of the young boy."
The studio artists continued to refine Mickey during the '30s.
By the end of the decade, the character assumed his most appealing
proportions in "Brave Little Tailor" (1938), "The
Pointer" (1939), and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice"
sequence of "Fantasia" (1940). Mickey is basically a construction
of circles and ovals, but the size of the circles and their relationships
-- the position of his ears on his head, the size of his eyes, etc.
-- make the difference between a visually appealing character and
an awkward one.
By the late '40s, Mickey's popularity with children and his role
as a corporate symbol had placed so many restrictions on his behavior
that he became dull. The rambunctious imp of the '20s and the polished
dancer of the '30s gradually turned into a docile suburbanite. Walt
summed up the problem in an interview in "Collier's" in
1949: "Mickey's decline was due to his heroic nature. He grew
into such a legend that we couldn't gag around with him. He acquired
as many taboos as a Western hero -- no smoking, no drinking, no
violence." Over the next several decades, the artists tinkered
with Mickey's appearance, for instance making his ears three-dimensional
in "The Nifty Nineties" (1941), but they never bettered
the Mickey of 1938-1940. When a new generation of artists animated
the character during the '90s, they looked to the Mickey of "Brave
Little Tailor" and "Sorcerer's Apprentice" as a model.
Frank Thomas, one of the celebrated "Nine Old Men,"
as Disney called his key cadre of animators, observed, "All
the Mickeys have something of Chaplin in them." They also have
a lot of Walt in them. Lillian Disney frequently noted how much
Mickey reminded her of Walt. Many story artists recall Walt rejecting
a gag or a piece of business in a cartoon because "Mickey wouldn't
think that way."
"Mickey was definitely Walt's alter-ego," states veteran
studio artist John Hench, who painted the official portraits of
Mickey for his 25th, 50th, and 60th birthdays. "Like Mickey,
Walt was optimistic; he certainly had enormous faith in himself,
and, of course, Mickey has enormous faith in himself -- he takes
on giants and whatnot. Mickey seemed like a live person. We knew
how he'd act under a given circumstance; there'd be some surprises,
but we knew basically how he'd behave."
"Mickey really is Walt in a lot of ways," agrees Roy
E. Disney. "I'm not sure it had occurred to me earlier so strongly,
but Mickey has all those nice impulses Walt had, the kind of gut-level
nice guy he was."
Walt Disney was fond of Donald and the rest of his studio's characters.
He supervised their development carefully, laughed at their antics,
and paid bonuses to animators who did exceptional footage of them.
But he always kept a special affection for Mickey Mouse that no
other character -- however successful -- could supplant.
Walt Disney became more involved in features, live-action films,
and other projects during the '40s. He stopped doing Mickey's voice
in 1947 because he didn't have the time to spend in the recording
studio and because years of heavy smoking had deepened and roughened
his voice. Jim Macdonald, a studio sound-effects man, spoke for
Mickey after that. But no one understood Mickey's nature as thoroughly
as Walt, which made it harder to find appropriate stories.
"Nobody but Walt could do the Mouse," says Ollie Johnston,
another of the celebrated "Nine Old Men." "He was
the only guy who felt how to handle Mickey. After 'The Sorcerer's
Apprentice,' there really wasn't a good Mickey. Then they started
drawing him in a different way, with different proportions. But
the drawing wasn't the problem; it was that they just didn't have
the right things for him to do."
The difficulty in finding "the right things for him to do"
was reflected in the decreasing number of Mickey cartoons Disney
produced after 1940. Between 1941 and 1965, the studio released
109 Donald shorts, 49 Goofys, and only 14 Mickeys. In most of them,
Mickey played straight man to Pluto and other comic characters.
Disney revealed his awareness of the character's limits in a story
meeting about the never-completed short, "Mountain Carvers,"
held on August 8, 1939:
"Mickey isn't funny in a situation of that sort. I think
people think of Mickey as a cute character -- he is a cute character
-- and he should be more likable in everything he does. I have always
kind of compared Mickey to Harold Lloyd -- he has to have situations
[or] he isn't funny... I'd rather not make Mickey [films] if we
don't get the right idea for him...These things with the Duck are
always funny, but if you try to pull those with Mickey, it seems
like someone trying to be funny."
Mickey and Pluto, from "The Pointer"
Walt had expressed similar reservations 18 months earlier (February
21, 1938) in a meeting about another unfinished cartoon, "Yukon
Mickey/Yukon Donald": "This picture might be suited better
for the Duck as you would be able to use more personality with the
Duck in spots where he would be laughing than you would with Mickey.
The expression and the voice of the Duck would help it. It is a
natural for the Duck to get in a situation like this -- and the
audience likes to see the Duck get it."
During development and pre-production, films that began as vehicles
for Mickey were sometimes rewritten for Donald, or the Duck, as
the studio artists called the character, for the reasons Disney
described. Donald's volatile temper made him funnier, especially
when he was the butt of a gag.
Donald Duck was listed among Mickey's friends in the book "The
Adventures of Mickey Mouse" (1931), but the character didn't
make his screen debut until "The Wise Little Hen" (1934).
Donald began as a rather pudgy bird with a narrow beak and feet.
During the next several years, the artists refined him into the
rounder, more attractive character familiar to audiences everywhere.
Donald's personality essentially gelled in his second film, "The
Orphan's Benefit" (1934, remade in color in 1941). When the
rowdy little mice laughed at his efforts to recite "Mary Had
a Little Lamb" and "Little Boy Blue," the Duck threw
his first temper tantrum. Over the next several decades, Donald
would appear in roles that ranged from the guardian of his three
nephews to Daisy's suitor to honey farmer to disgruntled Nazi factory
worker, but his famous temper was always evident.
Like "a Western hero," Mickey is straightforward, good-natured,
and modest; Donald is greedy, conceited, sneaky, and hot-tempered.
These very human foibles make it easy for Donald to be funny. His
personality brings him into conflict with his environment and other
characters, which provides opportunities for "the Duck to get
it." His unwarranted confidence in his own abilities leads
him to hatch elaborate schemes that invariably backfire.
Clarence Nash had created what would become Donald's voice when
he did imitations of a baby goat he kept as a pet. Years later,
when he used the voice to impersonate a little girl reciting "Mary
Had a Little Lamb," Disney heard his performance and exclaimed,
"That's our duck!"
After the war, Donald was pitted against a variety of foes. Two
chipmunks who had bedeviled Mickey's dog in "Private Pluto"
(1943) were dubbed Chip an' Dale in the cartoon of that name in
1947, which also marked their first match with Donald. Their feud
would continue through more than a dozen-and-a-half cartoons over
the next nine years. A series of cartoons involving Spike the Bee
(a.k.a. Buzz-Buzz) began with "Inferior Decorator" (1948):
The recurring gag was Spike dive-bombing Donald's plump rear. Some
of the studio's funniest postwar Duck cartoons involve a lazy, thieving
bear, who had appeared in "Hold That Pose" (1950) and
"Rugged Bear" (1953). In "Grin and Bear It"
(1954), he acquired the name Humphrey; later that year, he was joined
by the prissy park ranger, J. Audubon Woodlore, in "Bearly
Asleep."
Donald was difficult to understand, so words had to be kept to
a minimum in his films. Former storyman Carl Barks used dialogue
more extensively in the adventures he created for Donald and his
nephews in the Disney comic books, beginning with "Donald Duck
Finds Pirate Gold" in 1942. He cast Donald as a suburban adventurer
in spite of himself, who visited exotic locales at the insistence
of the fabulously wealthy miser, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, whom Barks
created in 1947. Both the adults inevitably had to be rescued by
Donald's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with the aid of the encyclopedic
Junior Woodchucks Guidebook. This version of Donald also had a temper,
but he was more of a suburban parent than the feisty Duck of the
cartoon shorts. A Donald Duck comic strip began in 1938; this version
of Donald was also a suburbanite, but the daily gag formula couldn't
accommodate Barks' baroque adventures.
Huey, Dewey, and Louie had arrived in "Donald's Nephews"
(1938): Donald received a postcard from his sister Dumbella announcing
the imminent visit of her "angel" children -- who promptly
made life hell for the Duck. That visit has lasted more than 60
years, and the trio shows no interest in leaving "Unca Donald"
to return home. In "Mr. Duck Steps Out" (1940) and "Don's
Fountain of Youth" (1953), the nephews are spoiled brats who
needlessly torment their uncle. But they usually just provide Donald
with opportunities to outsmart himself: He destroys gifts from the
trio in "Donald's Happy Birthday" (1949) and "Lucky
Number" (1951); in "Good Scouts" (1938) and "Hockey
Champ" (1939), Donald tries to pass himself off as an expert
-- with disastrous results. Even at their best, the animated Huey,
Dewey, and Louie were never as sensible or sympathetic as they were
in the Barks comic books.
In contrast to the hot-tempered Duck, the third member of Disney's
trio of cartoon stars was easygoing to a fault. Goofy, or the Goof,
made an unimpressive debut in 1932 as Dippy Dawg, a character in
the audience in "Mickey's Revue." He remained a bit player
for several years. His name was changed to Goofy -- a rare break
from the '30s pattern of alliterative monikers -- in "Orphan's
Benefit."

The "Mickey Mouse" unit at the Hyperion Studio, around
1929
Art Babbitt, one of the studio's leading animators, discovered Goofy's
potential in the 1935 short "Mickey's Service Station,"
when he did a scene of the Goof reaching his hand through an engine
block and inadvertently goosing himself. Babbitt's Goofy was an
eternal innocent, a rube who was simpleminded, but content. The
artist toyed with Goofy's lanky, loose-limbed form, adding such
touches as having the character's outsized foot rotate 360 degrees
at the ankle when he took a step. The combination of Babbitt's animation
and Pinto Colvig's vocal performance delighted audiences, and the
Goof took his place beside Mickey and Donald in some of the studio's
best shorts, including "Moving Day" (1936), "Clock
Cleaners," "Hawaiian Holiday," "Lonesome Ghosts"
(1937), and "Mickey's Trailer" (1938).
In his "Analysis of the Goof," Babbitt explained: "Think
of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible
Good Samaritan, a halfwit, a shiftless, good-natured hick...Yet
the Goof is not the type of halfwit that is to be pitied. He doesn't
dribble, drool, or shriek. He has music in his heart, even though
it may be the same tune forever, and I see him humming to himself
while working or thinking. He talks to himself because it is easier
for him to know what he is thinking if he hears it first."
The "How to Ride a Horse" sequence in "The Reluctant
Dragon" (1941) ushered in a new era of Goofy shorts directed
by Jack Kinney. Narrator and story sketch man John McLeish (a.k.a.
John Ployardt) would explain a sport in a suave baritone as the
eager but maladroit Goofy gamely attempted to demonstrate the activity.
The juxtaposition of McLeish's poised narration with the robust
chaos produced by Goofy's bumbling antics proved a successful formula,
and the series eventually included baseball, basketball, skiing,
fishing, hockey, golf, and tennis. The Goofy of the "How To"
shorts was more enthusiastic than Babbitt's blithe dimbulb, but
just as inept.
Goofy underwent a final transformation during the early '50s:
His posture improved and his loose-jointed shuffle was given an
energetic spring. His buck teeth and ears were reduced and his IQ
raised as he turned into a middle-class suburban father. This Goofy
was a put-upon dad, rather than a one-man destruction derby. The
best-known cartoon from this period is "Motor Mania" (1950),
a didactic look at American driving habits, which is still shown
in some driver training classes.
"Goofy became our resident homo sapiens -- with a dog face
-- our man who represented the common humanoid," comments animator
Ward Kimball, another member of the "Nine Old Men." "It
was Goofy against the world."
In the Mickey Mouse comic strip, Goofy served as Mickey's sidekick
in his detective adventures during the '30s. In a later, daily gag
version of the strip, he often delivered the punch line that would
dumbfound Mickey, the straight man.
Mickey, Donald, and Goofy were Disney's biggest stars; the studio
also had its equivalent of supporting actors and bit players.
Although Minnie Mouse debuted in "Steamboat Willie"
with Mickey in 1928, she never emerged as a character in her own
right: Analyzing her personality is like describing the flavor of
tap water. In the first cartoons, she was essentially Mickey in
a skirt and high heels. The artists gradually developed a more feminine
style of movement for her, but she existed only to be courted and/or
rescued. Her avian counterpart, Daisy Duck, first appeared as Donna
Duck in the 1937 short "Don Donald"; her name was changed
to Daisy in "Mr. Duck Steps Out" (1940). As Donald's temper
gave her more to react to, she exhibited a little more personality
than Minnie, although she often came across as a nag. The studio
artists didn't seem to know who Daisy was: In some films, she speaks
in Donald's "duckese"; in others, she talks in soft human
tones (supplied by women from the studio ink and paint department);
in a third group of shorts, she has a Southern accent.
Daisy exhibited real personality in just one short: "Donald's
Dilemma" (1947). When the Duck gets beaned by a falling flower
pot, his raucous quack is transformed into a mellifluous baritone
à la Bing Crosby. Daisy has to choose between regaining her
longtime boyfriend and letting him pursue a singing career ("the
world having his beautiful golden voice"): She hollers "Me!
Me! Me!" in a rare, delightful spasm of egotistical jealousy.

Walt at a Mickey drawing board
The dog who would become Pluto began as a pair of unnamed bloodhounds
in the Mickey short "The Chain Gang" (1930). Disney liked
Norm Ferguson's animation of the dogs' expressions and wanted to
develop the character. He became Minnie's pet, Rover, in "The
Picnic" (1930) before settling into the role of Mickey's pal,
Pluto, in "The Moose Hunt" (1931). But it was Ferguson's
animation of Pluto wrestling with a sheet of flypaper in "Playful
Pluto" (1934) that really established the character. In this
landmark sequence, Pluto actually seemed to be thinking as he struggled
to escape the sticky paper. Many of the subsequent shorts involved
Pluto wrestling with either an inanimate object or a strange animal.
"Pluto's Judgement Day" (1935) and "Lend a Paw"
(1941) set a second pattern for Pluto shorts: Pluto torments a kitten
or some other small animal out of anger or jealousy, only to repent
and bestow a sloppy kiss on his former nemesis in the final scene.
Clarabelle Cow was the linear descendant of the comic bovines
who appeared in several of the early "Alice" comedies
and Oswald Rabbit shorts, usually as the butt of udder gags. Similar
cows (and similar gags) appear in "Plane Crazy" and "Steamboat
Willie." Rubber-limbed and graceless, Clarabelle had her finest
moments in the slapstick sequences she shared with Goofy in "Orphan's
Benefit" and "Mickey's Fire Brigade" (1935). Usually
she was paired with Horace Horsecollar, who can be traced back to
the gangly horses in the Oswald cartoons. Neither Horace nor Clarabelle
developed much personality, and the artists gradually abandoned
the characters during the mid-'30s, except for cameos in "Mickey's
Birthday Party" (1942) and "Pluto's Christmas Tree"
(1952). In the comic strip, Clarabelle was cast a fussy spinster;
Horace, who served as Mickey's sidekick in Goofy's absence, was
her perennial suitor.
A squat, buxom caricature of an opera diva, Clara Cluck (voice
by Florence Gill) made her debut in "Orphan's Benefit"
(1934), when she barreled onto the stage to "bock-bock"
her way through the sextet from "Lucia di Lammermoor."
Disney may have considered making her a partner for Donald, as their
pairing in "Mickey's Grand Opera" (1936) suggests. But
the artists didn't come up with much for her to do, aside from some
visual gags involving the heaving ruff of white feathers that suggests
her bosom. She appeared in only a handful of cartoons.
The villainous Pete, a.k.a. Black Pete and Pegleg Pete, proved
to be one of Disney's more durable creations. The earliest version
of the character was the outsized, peg-legged cat who fought Julius
the Cat in some of the "Alice" shorts. During the later
'20s, he bedeviled Oswald and began to take on a more feline appearance.
In the Mickey shorts, Pete was often a criminal who had to be defeated:
He kidnaps Minnie in "The Gallopin' Gaucho" (1928), "The
Cactus Kid" (1930), and "Shanghaied" (1934); abducts
Minnie's Pekinese in "The Dognapper" (1934); and engages
Mickey in an aerial dogfight in "The Mail Pilot" (1933).
But Pete also appeared as an authority figure whom Mickey had to
outwit: The bullying skipper in "Steamboat Willie," the
sheriff who demands the mortgage in "Moving Day" (1936),
the dogcatcher in "The Worm Turns" (1937), and the ticket
collector who tries to throw Pluto off the train in "Mr. Mouse
Takes a Trip" (1940). Billy Bletcher, who had also been the
voice of the Big Bad Wolf in "Three Little Pigs" (1933),
provided his gravely tones. Pete was gradually phased out of the
animated films during the late '40s/early '50s.
The comic strip version of Pete was a more unsavory character,
who engaged in all sorts of criminal activities, including kidnapping,
theft, claim jumping, espionage, bribery, and sabotage. Needless
to say, Mickey foiled his every scheme.
In the 1949 story "History Lesson," science fiction
writer Arthur C. Clarke speculated on Mickey Mouse's ultimate legacy.
Thousands of years after an ice age has extinguished human life
on Earth, an expedition from Venus finds a short film in a cache
of artifacts. Fascinated and mystified, the scientists stare at
the grinning, large-eared biped on the screen:
"For the rest of time it would symbolize the human race.
The psychologists of Venus would analyze its actions and watch its
every movement until they could reconstruct its mind. Thousands
of books would be written about it. Intricate philosophies would
be contrived to account for its behavior... Millions of times across
the ages to come those last few words would flash across the screen,
and none could ever guess their meaning:
A Walt Disney Production."
"The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely
bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is understandable
that I should have a sentimental attachment for the little personage
who played so big a part in the course of Disney Productions and
has been so happily accepted as an amusing friend wherever films
are shown around the world. He still speaks for me and I speak for
him."
--Walt Disney
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR: CHARLES SOLOMON
Charles Solomon is an internationally respected critic and historian
of animation: His writings on the subject have appeared in "TV
Guide," "Rolling Stone," the "Los Angeles Times,"
"Modern Maturity," "Film Comment," the "Hollywood
Reporter," and the "Manchester Guardian," and been
reprinted in newspapers and professional journals in the United
States, Canada, France, Russia, Britain, Israel, the Netherlands,
and Japan. He is the author of "The Disney That Never Was"
(Hyperion, 1995) and "Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation"
(Knopf, 1989; reprinted, Wings, 1994), which was a New York Times
Notable Book of the Year and the first film book to be nominated
for a National Book Critics' Circle Award.
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