The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (4 page)

With the release of
Fantasia
(1940), Mickey’s new eyes became the accepted standard, and audiences had no difficulty accepting them.

Green shorts for Mickey Mouse were an alternate coloring variation in the early 1930s. Since Mickey Mouse was portrayed in black-and-white, it had never occurred to Walt Disney what color to make the shorts.

In fact, some of the early title cards for Mickey Mouse films had Mickey occasionally wearing striped shorts or checkered shorts, although he never wore them in the cartoon itself.

Mickey wore shorts as a boy, not an adult, would wear them. In 1928, when Mickey was created, young boys wore shorts (sometimes referred to as “knee-length trousers”) made with three buttons and no zipper. One unseen button secured the waist band. The other two secured a flap. When a boy had to urinate, he’d unbutton the flap rather than take off his shorts. A boy’s shorts usually only had these three buttons.

Mickey’s buttons originally started almost as high as his waist band, just like a child’s shorts, but they have gotten larger and been moved lower over the decades as the inspiration for their original placement was forgotten.

Some have suggested that the buttons were meant for use with suspenders, but Mickey almost never wore suspenders, not even in his earliest rural outings. On the rare occasions when he did wear them, it was clearly with a different set of clothes.

With no official color guide, some of the earliest George Borgfeldt merchandise had Mickey with green shorts (and green shoes). The
McCall’s
pattern for making a Mickey Mouse doll also had green shorts as the preferred color choice. In fact, the Charlotte Clark Mickey Mouse doll, the Steiff Mickey Mouse doll, and the Dean’s Rag Book (from England) Mickey Mouse doll were all produced with green shorts. Some of these stuffed dolls, such as the ones by Charlotte Clark, also featured red shorts.

When Walt first produced a color version of Mickey Mouse in the special short
Parade of the Award Nominees
(1932), he put Mickey in green shorts to contrast with the red drum major jacket. Walt did the same thing in the first official Mickey color cartoon,
The Band Concert
(1935). Mickey wears green shorts to contrast with his oversized red band-leader jacket.

Some items like the Mickey Mouse figural Bisque Toothbrush Holder came in versions with Mickey in green shorts and Mickey in red shorts.

Despite all the merchandise with Mickey in green shorts, he was also appearing more frequently and more prominently in red shorts in the early 1931 Mickey Mouse David McKay storybooksas well as a multitude of toys.

The most common 1932 “stock” United Artists movie poster advertising a Mickey Mouse cartoon had Mickey in red shorts (and green shoes). When individualized posters for specific Mickey Mouse cartoons were released in 1932, such as those for
Mickey’s Nightmare
,
The Wayward Canary
, and
The Mad Dog
(in which Mickey has red shoes), Mickey wore red shorts.

Around 1933, Kay Kamen, newly in charge of merchandising for Disney, helped establish that Mickey’s shorts would always be the now familiar red when Mickey was portrayed in color, just in time for the first Mickey Mouse Technicolor animated cartoons.

Kamen’s 1934
Mickey Mouse Merchandise
catalog as well as his Christmas Promotion 1934 spiral-bound booklet featured Mickey in red shorts (and yellow shoes) on the covers to emphasize to those using Mickey’s image for merchandise and display that he officially wore red shorts and yellow shoes.

In
Designing Disney
(Disney Editions, 2003), Disney Legend John Hench remembered when Walt asked him to paint Mickey’s official 25th birthday portrait in 1953:

I wanted to change his short pants. I said [to Walt], “Look, he’s the richest mouse in the world, the best known, and so forth. Why is he still in those short pants?” Walt said, “I’ll tell you why — because I like those little short pants.” So that’s what I painted.

When interviewed in 1975 by Disney archivist Dave Smith, Floyd Gottfredson said:

As far as [Mickey’s appearance], dropping the short pants and so on… we have always felt that that wasn’t too great a change in that Mickey has always been an actor in the films so he adopted the costume of whatever part he was playing at the time whether he was a bandmaster, a fireman or a brave little tailor or whatever. As time went on and as they began to put him in suits and long pants in the pictures, we just went along [in the newspaper comic strip].

Officially, Mickey Mouse always has a tail, but depending on the role he is playing or on the occasion, he tucks it in to his pants.

Around 1940, Mickey’s tail disappeared for a period of time simply because of the labor of adding it to so many drawings when budgets were limited at the Disney Studio during the War Years. In
One of Walt’s Boys
, (Tytle 1997), Disney producer Harry Tytle wrote:

Walt disliked the Mickeys drawn without tails (he called them “bob-tailed”) but capitulated because he knew how much easier (and faster) this rendered the animation.

The tail is missing in cartoons like
Lend a Paw
(1941),
The Nifty Nineties
(1941),
Mickey and the Seal
(1948), and others, as well as in the popular comic strip during this same time period.

Mickey’s tail was not just a squiggly line behind him; in the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, it reacted to Mickey’s moods just like Pluto’s tail reacted to Pluto’s moods, and required a great deal of time and effort to get right.

In
Walt Disney: An American Original
(Simon and Schuster 1978), Bob Thomas recounted the story of Walt describing a fight sequence for a Mickey Mouse short and acting out all the parts for director Wilfred Jackson, who did many of the early Mickey Mouse shorts. Jackson was confident that he could capture what Walt wanted.

When Walt saw the animation, he complained, “You’ve got the tail all wrong. Look — Mickey’s mad all over. His tail is tense, not a limp thing hanging there. What’s the matter, Jack — didn’t we talk this over?”

In the earliest black-and-white cartoons, Mickey often mimicked cartoon superstar Felix the Cat by using his tail to do things like grab a mallet or help reel himself up the side of a building. These type of antics disappeared in 1929 when the tail became just an appendage not a tool.

In his 1975 interview with Dave Smith, Floyd Gottfredson said:

The tail was dropped briefly during the war. As I understand this, it was because of the limited number of animation personnel [at the Disney Studio]. They felt that it just would save some time in animation. The tail was a thing that always had to be drawn to move pretty gracefully, so it required a little attention.

Then, after the war, they decided to bring it back on again and Walt asked [the comic strip department] to reinstate the tail on Mickey, and we’ve had it with us ever since. I don’t know whether anyone ever noticed, but as far as I know, we’ve never had any fan mail or comments on it.

Today, Mickey proudly displays his ever-expressive appendage.

Officially, the Disney Company firmly states that Mickey and Minnie are not married. Being married is an adult thing to do, and Mickey and Minnie are not officially adults.

Yet, Mickey and Minnie are capable of driving cars, owning homes, having jobs, and pursuing other activities only adults would do. In 1933, Walt told the British publication
Film Pictorial
that:

What it amounts to is that Minnie is, for screen purposes, his leading lady. If the story calls for a romantic courtship, then Minnie is the girl; but when the story requires a married couple, then they appear as man and wife. In the studio, we have decided that they are married really.

Being a conservative, moral man, it is doubtful that Walt would tolerate his alter ego dating a girlfriend for decades with no marriage plans. It is more likely that Walt considered Mickey and Minnie to be just like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, and other popular performing couples in the 1930s who were married in real life but who on the radio and on the screen often appeared to be single.

There are definite indications in the early 1930s that Walt was not adverse to the two characters marrying.

One such example is “The Wedding Party of Mickey Mouse” (1931), with music by Robert Bagar and lyrics by Milt Coleman and James Cavanaugh, and published by Bibo-Lang Incorporated (which held a merchandise license with the Disney Studio from 1930-1932). Bibo-Lang published the first Mickey Mouse storybook. Later reprints of the sheet music were done by Stasny up through 1936.

The sheet music cover, with its prominent Walt Disney Productions copyright notice, features Mickey in a tuxedo coat but wearing his two-button shorts. Minnie wears a veil and is followed by Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, and a half dozen other cheering animals.

“The Wedding of Mister Mickey Mouse” (1933), a novelty fox trot, with music by Franz Vienna and lyrics by Edward Pola, shows a happy Mickey Mouse outfitted in a tuxedo leading Minnie Mouse, also happy and covered with a veil, down the carpet with best-man Horace Horsecollar and maid-of-honor Clarabelle Cow cheering them on.

The sheet music was from Keith Prowse & Co. and the cover has the phrase “By special permission of Walt Disney — the creator of the popular Mickey Mouse.” The cover artwork was by Wilfred Haughton, a British cartoonist responsible for much of the artwork in early Disney comics and in annuals published in the United Kingdom. In the song, even “Peg-leg Pete calls a truce” for the wedding ceremony.

In
Mickey’s Nightmare
(1932), Mickey dreams of getting married to Minnie and the bliss it will bring. However, borrowing a plot device from an Oswald the Rabbit cartoon,
Poor Papa
(1928), Mickey is so inundated with a never-ending stream of baby mice and their many demands that the dream becomes a nightmare.

Walt told writer Louise Morgan of the
News Chronicle
(June 1935) that “there’s no marriage in the land of make-believe. Mickey and Minnie must live happily ever after.”

In 1934, British novelist E.M. Forster wrote:

It seems likely that they have married one another, since it is unlikely that they have married anyone else, since there is nobody else for them to marry.

A Mickey Mouse short abandoned in 1941, entitled
Mickey’s Elopement
, has Mickey trying to get Minnie to an all-night wedding chapel.

Actress Russi Taylor, who provided the voice of Minnie Mouse starting in 1986, was married to late voice actor Wayne Allwine, who did the voice of Mickey Mouse. So, for a while, it was true that Mickey and Minnie were happily married in real life.

As Taylor stated in an interview with
Disney Magazine
(Spring 1997):

The characters aren’t going to get married, because children relate to Mickey and Minnie at their own levels. They don’t know how old Mickey and Minnie are, but if they were to get married, they would become adults and spoil the illusion.

Mickey will have been around for 85 years as of November 2013.

The Disney Company, however, no longer celebrates Mickey’s birthday for fear that his real age will seem too old for new, young audiences.

At a birthday celebration for Mickey, Disney Legend Frank Thomas said:

I think Walt saw Mickey as having the spirit of a nine-year-old boy with the capability of a fourteen year old. But he also thought of him as ageless.

Walt Disney told
American Cinematographer
magazine in 1932:

In some pictures, [Mickey] has a touch of Fred Astaire; in others, Charlie Chaplin and some of Douglas Fairbanks but in all of these should be some of a young boy.

In 1988, Disney Legend Ollie Johnston stated:

Mickey reflected Walt’s boyhood personality and did a lot of the things Walt had wanted to do as a boy himself — rescuing princesses, beating up bullies, putting on variety shows.

Disney storyman Ted Sears, while lecturing in 1939 to a group of animators at the Disney Studio, had this to say about how Mickey should be portrayed:

Mickey is not a clown… he is neither stupid nor idiotic. His comedy is subordinate to the situation in which he finds himself. His age varies according to the situation; sometimes his character is the one of a young boy, whereas at other times, particularly in the adventure films, he acts like an adult.

Officially, Mickey Mouse’s birthday is November 18, 1928, which is the official birthday of Minnie Mouse as well.

Of the Fab Five, only Mickey, Minnie, and Donald Duck have official birthdays. Pluto and Goofy evolved through several cartoons, so it is difficult to credit a particular cartoon with their emergence.

Disney archivist Dave Smith determined through a program from the Colony Theater in New York that Mickey’s first truly public appearance was in
Steamboat Willie
on November 18, 1928. For Mickey’s 50th birthday celebration in 1978, that date became his official birthday.

In 1988, Dave Smith told Disney historian Jim Fanning why an oficial birth date for Mickey Mouse had to be established:

The Walt Disney Company is now reaching a point in its history where there are many significant anniversaries to celebrate, and the company has come to realize that these celebrations can be very useful marketing tools.

For the previous fifty years, the Disney Company had selected any date from September through late November as Mickey Mouse’s birthday primarily as a merchandising tool to encourage theaters to rent Mickey Mouse cartoons and to do special promotions like parties.

On October 25, 1931, the
Los Angeles Times
, after contacting the Disney Studio, affirmed that Mickey Mouse’s birthday was October 24, and that was when he had celebrated his third birthday.

In 1932, Mickey’s fourth birthday was announced as October 1, although the celebration lasted for several days. A “Mickey Mouse Birthday Party of the Air” was broadcast on NBC radio the night of September 29. The next morning, internationally known restaurateur George Rector went on WJZ and NBC to announce, in honor of Mickey’s birthday, a special cheese sandwich that would be featured in all A&P stores.