Mickey Milestones
In 1931, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London unveiled a likeness of Mickey Mouse. It stood ro
Mouse-ka-Talesughly three-feet tall and featured Mickey sitting on a stool and playing a piano. His left arm was raised high in the air while his right hand played the keys. The piano with squiggly legs was bending in the middle from the force of Mickey’s playing. The pose was very reminiscent of Mickey’s picture on the cover of the sheet music for “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo”.
In 1937, on Mickey’s ninth birthday, The Boy Scouts of America bestowed upon him membership in the Cubuts.
Mickey Mouse was on the front of the first Disney Dollar released in 1987. A special Disney Dollar was released in 1993 to celebrate Mickey’s 65th birthday: on it, a smiling Mickey adjusts his bowtie to look neat and pretty. Disney artist Matt Mew, the original designer of the Disney Dollars as well as the designer for Mickey’s 60th birthday celebration, stated: “Right from the start we had no doubt in our minds that Mickey would be on the front of the one dollar bill.”
Mickey Mouse was the Grand Marshal for the 116th Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day 2005. He was the first cartoon character to receive the honor and the second fictional character. (The first was Kermit the Frog in 1996, unless you also count ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy who was co-Grand Marshal with Edgar Bergen in 1940.)
In announcing that Mickey would be Grand Marshal, Tournament of Roses President Dave Davis announced: “Mickey Mouse has brought entertainment, joy and laughter to families around the world for 75 years and we couldn’t think of a more ideal Grand Marshal to help us
Celebrate Family
in 2005. He is a friend to families around the world.”
Talk show host Larry King said: “When Mickey Mouse waves at you in a parade or on the screen, you almost
have
to smile. There is no other comparable cartoon figure anywhere. When Mickey Mouse is around, somehow things seem a little brighter.”
The first Mickey Mouse balloon appeared in the 1934 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and was a collaborative effort between Walt Disney and Macy’s Tony Sarg.
It was forty-feet tall, contained 2,664 cubic feet of helium, and lasted through 1939. Mickey appeared in 1972 (wearing an open-collared yellow shirt) to celebrate the first anniversary of the Walt Disney World Resort.
Mickey returned again in 1973 to mark fifty years of Disney cartoons. In 2000, a new Bandleader Mickey balloon was introduced, and Sailor Mickey debuted in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade of 2009 to mark the announcement of the
Disney Dream
and
Disney Fantasy
cruise ships.
Mickey Mouse was the first animated character to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 13, 1978, in honor of his 50th birthday. The star is located at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, A.W. Robertson, Chairman of the Board of Westinghouse, and Grover Whalen, President of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, placed a Mickey Mouse wristwatch into a sealed time capsule not to be opened for five thousand years (the year 6939) and buried fifty feet deep. Also included were a kewpie doll, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a Gillette safety razor, a dollar in change, copies of
Life
magazine, and more.
In 1934, Mickey Mouse first appeared as an entry in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Today’s entry states: “Mickey Mouse, the most popular character of Walt Disney’s animated cartoons and arguably the most popular cartoon star in the world.”
In May 1928, Disney filed a trademark petition for the name “Mickey Mouse”. The trademark (#247,156) was granted to Disney in late September 1928, which may help explain why that month was considered Mickey Mouse’s birthday for many years. The Disney Company actually owns sixteen separate trademarks for the name “Mickey Mouse” granted between 1928-2011 to cover a variety of uses.
A U.S. commemorative stamp was released in 1968 with the smiling face of Walt Disney but not Mickey Mouse. Postal regulations at that time prohibited the placing of a Disney copyright notice on its stamps. However, other countries around the world did not have similar restrictions, so Mickey first appered on a ninety lira stamp from the tiny republic of San Marino in 1970 with an appropriate copyright notice.
The “Art of Disney: Friendship” stamps, issued in 2004 by the U.S. Postal Service, included Mickey Mouse. These designs were created by Dave Pacheco and Peter Emmerich. The “Art of Disney: Celebration” stamps in 2005 featured Mickey Mouse with Pluto; The “Art of Disney: Romance” stamps in 2006 featured Mickey Mouse with Minnie Mouse; The “Art of Disney: Magic” stamps n 2007 included Sorcerer Apprentice Mickey; and The “Art of Disney: Imagination” stamps in 2008 had Mickey as Steamboat Willie.
In 1986, a gigantic 10-story hot-air balloon in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head and called
Ear Force One
took to the sky to celebrate Walt Disney World’s 15th birthday. Made by Cameron Balloons Ltd. of Bristol, England, and inspired by the Mickey helium balloons sold in the Disney parks, the balloon had ears 35 feet in diameter, a nose that stretched 33 feet, and eyes 16.5 feet high.
The diameter of the head was 168.3 feet. Uninflated, the balloon weighed 330 pounds without the basket. With pilots Robert Carlton and David Justice, it toured the nation (including a visit to Disneyland) in 1988 to celebrate Mickey’s 60th birthday.
While this balloon was decommissioned many years ago, a new Mickey Mouse-headed balloon dubbed “The Happiest Balloon on Earth” from Cameron Balloons made its debut to celebrate Disneyland’s 50th Birthday on April 2006. It sported a Golden Ears mouse cap like the souvenirs that guests could purchase and the cap was carefully removed after the celebration year for its appearances at other events.
“The Happiest Balloon on Earth” stands 98-feet tall and spans 53 feet from ear-to-ear. Mickey’s pupils are 6 feet across, his nose is 5.5 feet wide, and it took over nine miles of thread to sew together this special shape. It was piloted by Scott Spencer and his wife, Laurie, for its initial four-month tour of the West Coast.
In 1988, to help celebrate Mickey’s 60th birthday, the Disney Company had the Pitzenberger family of Sheffield, Iowa, plant a cornfield in the shape of Mickey’s head on their farmland over the course of a day and a half. The profile of Mickey’s head consisted of 6.5 million corn plants surrounded by 300 acres of oats. The distance between the tip of Mickey’s nose to the end of his ear was 1.1 miles. Fifteen thousand people showed up in Sheffield (total population of 1,244) to celebrate Mickey’s birthday, and for many months planes flying overhead would point out the field to passengers.
Mickey Moo, a white Holstein cow with a black Mickey Mouse head silhouette shape naturally occurring on her side, was housed in Big Thunder Ranch at Disneyland’s Frontierland in 1988. The cow was born in 1982 in Maine and passed away in 1993 at the age of eleven from intestinal problems.
Minnie Moo, a similar white Holstein with a similar black silhouette, came to the Walt Disney World Resort from Edgerton, Minnesota, in 1990, living first at Grandma Duck’s Farm in the Magic Kingdom and then at the Petting Farm at the Tri-Circle D Ranch in Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground. She passed away in 2001 at the age of 15.
In 1971, for the first time,
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
listed “mickey mouse” as an adjective defined as “lacking importance or serious meaning”. The use of “mickey mouse” as a derogatory term is traced back to soldiers in World War II.
To promote the opening of Disney MGM Studios in 1989, Mickey Mouse toured thirty-seven cities in a forty-foot long “LiMOUSEine”. The interior was supposed to be “Mickey’s House” and included a soda fountain, cheese cabinet, satellite tracking system, a radio remote DJ booth (to be used by disc jockeys in the cities along the tour), four sunroofs, and many more technical enhancements.
The 9,000-pound, six-wheeled, maroon-colored limo with Mickey’s famous head silhouette on the front grille toured East Coast cities for four months. The car was built by Ultra Limousine of Los Angeles at a cost close to $300,000.
For Disneyland’s 35th Birthday celebration, Ultra Limousine of Los Angeles created “Mickey’s Mouseorail” to travel the country to promote the event. The Mickey’s Mouseorail body consisted of the shell and interior compartment of the Mark III Monorail Red lead car (with the bubble top for the driver) and fused to a stretched Chevy commercial truck chassis.
Mickey’s Mouseorail debuted at the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1990, and then led the 35th anniversary parade at Disneyland on January 11, 1990, before going on a national tour with Mickey Mouse. The famous Mickey “tail lights” were included along with “ear-view” mirrors and a license plate that said “35Ears”.
Mickey Miscellaneous
A survey of American children taken during the Great Depression revealed that many of them thought Mic
The appkey was a dog or a cat, even though his last name was Mouse, according to an article in a 1935 issue of
Time
magazine: “Anyway, a current survey shows that children don’t think of Mickey as a mouse. A good many of them were asked whether Mickey Mouse is a dog or a cat. Almost half of the tots answered brightly, ‘A cat’.”
A witch doctor in the Belgian Congo reportedly used a homemade mask of “Mikimus” to provide a little extra magic. When actor Doug Fairbanks went on a world tour, he showed Mickey Mouse movies to head-hunters of the South Seas Islands to keep them friendly.
In the 1930s, Kaffirs, members of a South African tribe, refused to take cakes of soap unless they were embossed with a Mickey Mouse image, just as they had years earlier refused to take coins not marked with the image of Queen Victoria.
Reporting on experiments that animals may be instinctively capable of aesthetic appreciation, reporter Tony Osman reported in the
Sunday Times
in the early 1970s that a monkey’s response to images on a television screen revealed that “an unfamiliar animal could hold his interest for a few minutes, and he would watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon for as long as the film continued.”
On a trip to South America in the 1940s, Walt Disney was begged by people time and again to sketch a picture of Mickey as a souvenir. As
Collier’s
magazine reported in its April 9, 1949, issue: “When he complied, the only Mickey Mouse he could draw, or perhaps would draw, was the outmoded string-bean Mickey of a decade or two ago.”
At the time of singer Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, according to his biographer Albert Goldman, Elvis was the second most commonly reproduced face in the world. The first was Mickey Mouse.
Worcester, Massachusetts officially proclaimed May 12, 1935, as Mickey Mouse Day. A Mickey Mouse Mall was set up in front of City Hall. School children, the Mayor, and City Council members paid homage; restaurants had Mickey Mouse on their tablecloths; clerks had Mickey Mouse on their smocks; and the
Boston Herald
began its lead editorial: “They are making history today in Worchester. They also made money.”
McCall’s
magazine had this description of Mickey’s presence at the Disney Studio in its August 1932 issue: “On the walls inside the [Hyperion] studio, in private offices as well as in conference rooms, are framed drawings of Mickey Mouse in every conceivable pose. Painted on one door in red and gold is a shield bearing Mickey’s Coat of Arms. The mystic words ‘Ickmay Ousmay’ are inscribed on this heraldic emblnd they have puzzled studio visitors a good deal. But guests who recall a jargon almost universal among American children grin and translate the gibberish into ‘Mickey Mouse’. This was the language whereby dark secrets were kept from inquisitive adults.”
The 91st meeting of the American Psychological Association was held in Anaheim, California, September 1983. Because of the location, the members decided to prepare a “brief Psychohistory” of Mickey Mouse. Their conclusion: “Mickey Mouse is actually Walt Disney in smaller form, with a long tail. Plucky, spirited and optimistic and much like his creator, ready to take a chance!”
Generally, they found the Mouse had a pretty stable ego.
In the greenhouse of EPCOT’s The Land pavilion in Florida, watermelons, pumpkins, and cucumbers are grown in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. These edible treats are served to guests and when sliced properly retain their familiar form. The EPCOT Science team shapes the young watermelons in special plastic molds until the fruit forms the familiar three-circled Mickey head.
Around 1957, Dr. Tom Dooley of the Medical International Cooperation Organization (MEDICO) got special permission to put the image of Mickey on the side of his hospital ship anchored off a southeast Asian coast. Mickey succeeded in luring young patients for free examinations and treatment where even the Red Cross sign painted on the ship had not.
They had never seen Mickey before, but the kids happily boarded the ship. Disney Legend John Hench said: “Obviously, hardly any of them had ever seen a picture of Mickey. But they recognized something. It wasn’t the cartoon character; it was the symbol.”
Farfur (also spelt Farfour) was a costumed character who looked exactly like Mickey Mouse and who spoke in a high-pitched voice on the Arabic children’s television program,
Tomorrow’s Pioneers
(2007). The show advocated anti-Semitism and anti-American values. Disney CEO Robert Iger said, “We were appalled by the use of our character to disseminate that kind of message.” Diane Disney Miller called the character “pure evil”.
To promote the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese erected several statues depicting a cartoony athlete mouse with red shorts and white gloves. When asked about its resemblance to Mickey, a spokesperson replied, “They have square holes in their ears. They are not copies.” The spokesperson suggested the statues are unique because they incorporate the themes of old Chinese coins (the square holes), the year of the rat, the Olympics, and the financial district into the design. However, children passing by the statues were seen pointing and saying, “Look! It’s Mickey!”
