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The Authorized Biography Of The Real Mickey Mouse <<<
Disney produced both Plane Crazy and Galloping Gaucho, after solving many
technical problems, before he was able to sell Mickey Mouse in the black
and white talkie Steamboat Willie, the world’s first animated sound
cartoon. First booked on Broadway at the Colony Theatre, Steamboat Willie
ran for a solid two weeks amid roars of appreciative laughter. Mickey,
with his squeaky voice and jerky walk, played the captain of a Mississippi
River steamboat who danced and tooted his boat whistle with gay abandon.
“Mickey growls, whines, squeaks and makes various sounds that add to the
mirthful quality,” the New York Times film critic wrote in applauding the
cartoon. Other critics all over the world joined in praising Mickey. With
Steamboat Willie’s appearance in l928 the Mouse became an overnight
sensation.
That year Mickey began to win fame enough to satisfy the most ambitious
human. His popularity knew no national boundaries, sojourners everywhere
found home in his cartoons. In France he became known as Michael Souris;
in Italy as Topolino; in Japan, Miki Kuchi; in Spain, Miguel Ratoncito; in
Latin America, El Raton Miguelto; in Sweden, Muse Pigg; in Germany,
Michael Maus; and in Russia, Mikki Maus. At its peak the Mouse’s fan mail
approached l0,000 letters a day.
Mickey inspired Disney to invent a host of fantabulous anthropomorphic
cartoons and characters. Father Goose, as he has been dubbed, inspired
creations millions will never forget and untold millions will learn never
to forget. You could count on the knuckles of your fingers folk heroes as
appealing as Mickey and Disney’s other nanoid creations. Pluto, that most
amiable of clumsy dogs; Donald Duck; Goofy; Scrooge McDuck; Horace
Horsecollar; José Carioca; Clarabelle Cow; even a relative of Mickey’s
named Mortimer. This is not to mention immortal screen versions of
characters like Pinnochio, Dumbo, Bambi (Henry Ford’s favorite), Peter
Pan, The Three Little Pigs, Ferdinand the Bull, Herbie the Love Bug,
Maleficent the Evil Witch, Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty,
Brer Rabbit, Snow White – and of course, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy,
Happy, Sleepy, and Doc. Flower power before its time, Fantasia, tigers
with cavities, pumpkins growing on the vine complete with Jack O’Lantern
faces. Then there were the songs from Walt’s many films, such as “Whistle
While You Work,” “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go,” “Someday My
Prince Will Come,” “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?,” “When You Wish
Upon A Star” and many others. Disney was probably the only artist to be
praised by both the American Legion and the Soviet Union. His film with
Donald Duck singing “We heil, we heil, right in the Fuhrer’s face” proved
to be among the most effective propaganda weapons of World War II when it
was translated into a dozen languages and dropped behind enemy lines to be
used by resistance groups. Mickey and his friends were responsible for
Disney winning 32 Oscars (more than anyone in movie history), 4 Emmys,
honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale, the French Legion of Honor, and
the Presidential Freedom medal – more than 900 awards in all, not
including the nomination by a leading French magazine in l964 for the
Nobel Prize. Pretty good for a modest country boy who once told reporters
“I’m selling corn, and I like corn!”
Disney, the natural genius, the simple-minded man totally alien to
intellectual analysis, perhaps best explained the phenomena of his and his
Mouse’s popularity. “Sometimes I’ve tried to figure out why Mickey
appealed to the whole world,” he once told a reporter. “So far as I know,
nobody really has. He’s a pretty nice fellow who never does anybody any
harm, who gets into scrapes through no fault of his own, but always
manages to come up grinning. Why Mickey’s even been faithful to one girl,
Minnie, all his life. Mickey is so simple and uncomplicated, so easy to
understand that you can’t help liking him.”
There is no doubt that Mickey Mouse embodied everything that Walt Disney
liked, whereas Mickey’s near equal in popularity, Donald Duck – said to be
based loosely on the Old Curmudgeon of Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration, Harold Ickes – was a combination of all the qualities he
disliked in people. In any event, the esteemed British cartoonist David
Low has called Mickey’s creator “the most significant figure in graphic
arts since Leonardo Da Vinci.” And in a tribute to Disney after his death
in l965, aged 65, a New York Times editorial observed that what Disney
“gave to us and the world . . . is all summed up in a friendly, engaging
mouse named Mickey. It is not a small bequest . . . he was simply the
father of Mickey Mouse . . .”
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