Read The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Online

Authors: Jim Korkis

Tags: #Mickey Mouse, #walt disney, #Disney

The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (5 page)

BOOK: The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse
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On October 1, W.T. Grant department stores unveiled special displays by the Candy Institute of America, Inc., whose members produced a large share of the confections sold in the United States, with the slogan: “Celebrate Mickey Mouse’s Birthday with Candy”.

United Artists, distributors of the Mickey Mouse films, announced a “mouse-warming” at the Rivoli theater in New York.

On October 4, George Olsen and his orchestra hosted a Mickey Mouse birthday party at the Hotel New Yorker that began at 11:00 p.m. and was broadcast live from midnight to 12:30 a.m. on a nationwide hookup over the National Broadcasting System. It featured several Mickey Mouse songs including “What? No Mickey Mouse? What Kind of a Party Is This?”. Invited guests included actors Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard, and Edmund Lowe, as well as such celebrities as boxer Jack Dempsey.

The October 7, 1932, issue of
San Antonio Light
reported that one of Mickey Mouse’s birthday parties (celebrated that year on October 1) was held at the prestigious Coconut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, with “Walt Disney cutting Mickey’s birthday cake.”

Mickey’s fifth birthday was celebrated on September 30, 1933, with a Hollywood testimonial party featuring speakers like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Will Rogers.

Yet, in the September 1933 issue of
Film Pictorial
magazine, Walt Disney was quoted as saying:

Mickey Mouse will be five years old on Sunday. He was born on October 1, 1928. That was the date on which his first picture was started so we have allowed him to claim this day as his birthday.

Actually, Ub Iwerks had animated a test scene from
Steamboat Willie
as early as July 1928 so that Walt could practice synchronizing the sound to the scene, but that date was never claimed as Mickey’s birth.

Iwerks began work on Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon appearance,
Plane Crazy
(1928), during the last week of April 1928. That date was never used in publicity as Mickey’s official birth date because its spring time period wouldn’t have significantly increased theater bookings for a Mickey Mouse short. A fall date like September or October, when theater attendance usually dipped before the holiday season, was a better time for theaters to celebrate Mickey’s birthday by hosting a party and screening several Disney shorts.

Mickey’s seventh birthday was celebrated on September 28, 1935, with movie theaters encouraged to book entire programs of
Mickey Moused
Silly Symphony
cartoons as part of the celebration, which Disney called “Mickey’s Lucky Seventh Birthday”.

In fact, every print of every available Disney animated cartoon was in use during this celebration. The theaters in Chicago alone booked more than 450 reels. Theater celebrations included birthday cake and costume parties, and some theaters offered free admission to anyone dressed as a Disney character. Guy Lombardo and his orchestra even recorded a special fox trot, “Mickey Mouse’s Birthday Trot”, for the occasion.

Floyd Gottfredson drew a birthday-themed installment of the Mickey Mouse comic strip.

Disney and United Artists contacted thousands of businesses and institutions to join in the celebration with special parties.

For Mickey’s eighth birthday, Radio City Music Hall hosted a week-long salute with three Disney cartoons as part of every show.

Other theaters had smaller celebrations with prizes for Disney costumes, and coloring and essay contests. The prizes? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck dolls from Charlotte Clark, personally autographed by Walt Disney!

The Disney Studio even produced two animated shorts,
The Birthday Party
(1931, in black-and-white) and
Mickey’s Birthday Party
(1942, in Technicolor), as the centerpiece for a collection of Disney cartoons to be shown in theaters.

In 1938, Mickey’s birthday was celebrated on September 27.

In 1949, to celebrate Mickey’s 21st birthday, Ingersoll produced a Mickey Mouse alarm clock packaged in a birthday box in the shape of a cake “with real candles that light” and which included a “sterling silver ring” and a bright red ballpoint pen with a decal of Mickey on it. It sold for eight dollars.

At Walt Disney’s request, the first official birthday portrait of Mickey Mouse was done this year by Disney Legend John Hench for the April issue of
Collier’s
magazine. It featured Mickey leaning against a globe of the earth with blue curtains behind him. Walt liked it so much that Hench became the official portrait artist for the Mouse and four years later did the much more famous 25th birthday painting with Mickey in Walt’s office. In the background of that painting, the hi-fi equipment and bookcase were from Hench’s own house. Walt hung the original painting in his office where it stayed until his death. Hench later painted other official Mickey Mouse portraits, including those for the character’s 50th (1978), 60th (1988), and 75th (2003) birthdays.

In 1953, the entire month of September was considered Mickey’s “birthday month.”

Capitol Records produced a “record-reader” entitled
Mickey Mouse’s Birthday Party
(DBX 3165) to celebrate Mickey’s Silver Anniversary of being twenty-five years young.

A record-reader was a two-record set accompanied by a storybook and some cue, like the sound of a bell or a horn, to let a child know when to turn the page so that the sounds on the record would match the story in the book (in this case, Mickey Mouse coaxed Donald Duck to give the signal to turn the page).

The voice of Mickey Mouse was provided by Stan Freberg. In 1996, Freberg told me:

Walt Disney was always the voice of Mickey, when he was alive, but when he was too busy, his sound effects wizard Jimmy MacDonald did it. Once, when Capitol Records was recording a children’s album called
Mickey Mouse’s Birthday Party
and both Walt and Jimmy were busy, Walt asked me to record Mickey’s voice: [imitating the falsetto] “Hi, Minnie, Hi Pluto, Happy Birthday! Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha!”.

In September, Dell Comics printed a special one-hundred-page comic book “giant”,
Mickey MBirthday Party
, with a Dick Moores cover of Mickey Mouse by a birthday cake where the candles were actually Disney characters. The interior included reprints from several Dell Four Color issues (#181, #27, and #79) as well as some reformatted Mickey Mouse comic strips from 1941 by Floyd Gottfredson and Bill Wright.

Magazines such as
Child’s Life
ran articles about Mickey’s Silver Anniversary throughout the month.

According to a 1968 issue of
Disney News
, Mickey’s 40th birthday was to be officially celebrated September 27, 1968. This event was featured on Disney’s weekly television program in an episode entitled “Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show” (December 22, 1968) with host Dean Jones joined by the original Mouseketeers.

On October 16, 1975, cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson drew another commemorative version of Mickey’s daily newspaper comic strip to celebrate the character’s 47th birthday.

Mickey’s 50th birthday in 1978 was a year-long celebration that generated not only an official “Happy Birthday, Mickey” logo but a variety of commemorative merchandise. It was the first official celebration of Mickey’s birthday as being November 18.

Retrospective screenings of Mickey’s cartoons were shown at venues such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Institute, and the Chicago Film Festival.

Animator Ward Kimball accompanied Mickey on a special Amtrak train for a cross-country, fifty-seven city Birthday Express tour. The tour ended at the Broadway Theater (formerly the Colony Theater, where
Steamboat Willie
premiered), where a plaque designating the theater as the official birthplace of Mickey Mouse was installed. Kimball later recalled one of his experiences on the tour:

The time of day that we stopped at a town didn’t matter a bit. Even at two or three o’clock in the morning, there were hundreds of people out there holding their kids up high just to get a glimpse of Mickey as he stepped from the train or waved to them from the platform of the observation car. I have never gotten over that and realized then the power that Mickey Mouse has as a symbol.

Sometimes the press of people was so great, even after Mickey had gone inside that it was impossible to move the train out of the station without the danger of hurting someone. I devised a method that solved that problem in most places. We had cartons of little yellow pin-back buttons that said ‘Happy Birthday, Mickey’ on them and I would stand on the rear platform and toss those buttons far to the rear of the train. As the people scrambled to pick up the buttons, the train was able to slowly pull out of the station. Interestingly enough, those buttons have become very attractive to collectors today.

Seven huge scrapbooks in the Disney Archives are filled with newspaper clippings from the year-long birthday event.

In addition, Mickey received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, making him the first cartoon character ever to do so.

People were singing a specially written song, “The Whole World Wants to Wish You Happy Birthday, Mickey Mouse.”

And finally, a parade was held in his honor at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World during that year.

For Mickey’s 50th birthday in 1978, a special episode of
The Wonderful World of Disney
weekly television show (“Mickey’s 50”) aired on November 19. It featured celebrities like Johnny Carson and Jonathan Winters honoring Walt’s mouse.

For Mickey’s 60th birthday in 1988, another special episode of
The Wonderful World of Disney
(“Mickey’s 60”) aired on November 13. It featured Mickey fooling with a sorcerer’s hat and disappearing, forcing Roger Rabbit to try and find him while “news reporter” John Ritter gave commentary and updates.

From summer 1988 through spring 1990 at Walt Disney World, Mickey’s birthday was celebrated at a new temporary area of the park near Fantasyland called Mickey’s Birthdayland. Guests could tour Mickey’s house and then meet him in the Movie Barn next door. Mickey cartoons were shown continuously in the queue area.

Disney produced a 68-page slick magazine,
Mickey is Sixty
, with a special edition “cel” of Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Excerpts from this magazine appeared in
Time
,
Life
,
People
, and elsewhere. Sharp-eyed readers found that at the bottom of page 35, instead of “Mickey is Sixty,” someone had cleverly snuck in “Mickey is Sexy” — much to the embarrassment of the Disney Company.

Ear Force One
, a hot air balloon in the shape of Mickey’s head, toured the United States.

The Disney Company planted a 520-acre cornfield in Sheffield, Iowa, in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. When the field was seen from overhead in an airplane, it looked like a birthday card for Mickey from Minnie. (This idea was the brainchild of Disney Legend Jack Lindquist, who was then Disney’s Vice-President for Creative Marketing.)

In addition, Disney created another special Mickey Mouse birthday logo as well as a flood of nicely done commemorative merchandise honoring both the classic Mickey and the modern Mickey.

For Mickey’s 70th birthday, Walt Disney Art Classics, the art and collectibles division of the Disney Company, commissioned Imagineer John Hench to render Mickey in an official portrait. which was published as a limited edition print in December 1998. It was an instant sell-out.

Today, the Disney Company does not officially celebrate a year for Mickey’s birthday for fear that children might think Mickey is too old. In a statement from 2003, Chris Curtin of Disney Synergy and Special Projects wrote:

We particularly worry about this when it comes to children, whose understanding and appreciation of our characters can be undermined by suggesting they have real-world ages. As a company, we feel our characters are timeless and therefore don’t mark the passage of time.

So, that is why the Disney Company did not celebrate Mickey Mouse’s 75th birthday in 2003, but in a smaller fashion celebrated “75 Years WITH Mickey”.

On November 18, 2003, in a private media ceremony, Michael Eisner unveiled 75 Mickey Mouse statues each standing six feet tall and weighing 700 pounds. They were designed by a mix of celebrities including Tom Hanks, John Travolta, Ben Affleck, Susan Lucci, and others. Those who participated in the design created the Mickey Mouse statues to fit one of six themes: heritage, adventure, magic and fantasy, fun and laughter, friendship, and the future.

The statues were displayed in various locations at Walt Disney World through April 2004, after which they were exhibited in 12 U.S. cities on an 18-month tour sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company. After the tour, the statues were auctioned off with the proceeds benefiting a charity of each artist’s choice.

The Disney Company did not officially celebrate Mickey’s 85th birthday in 2013.

Who Does Mickey Mouse’s Voice?

The original voice of Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney.

Currently, Bret Iwan is the official voice of Mickey Mouse, although Chris Diamantopoulos voiced the character in a series of 19 Disney Channel shorts released beginning in 2013. Before Iwan got the job, the Disney Company officially recognized only three performers in this role:

  • Mickey’s creator Walt Disney spoke for the little fellow from 1928 to 1947. He also supplied Mickey’s voice for animated portions of the original
    Mickey Mouse Club
    television show in 1955.
  • Disney sound-effects genius Jimmy MacDonald took over from Walt in 1947 and continued until 1977.
  • Wayne Allwine performed the famous vocalizations from 1977 to 2009.

Over the years, many other people have voiced the famous falsetto of Mickey Mouse for a variety of projects.

  • J. Donald Wilson once did it on radio, as did Joe Twerp, who supplied the voice for 17 episodes of
    Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air
    in 1938.
  • Comedian and writer Stan Freberg supplied the voice on a 1955 children’s record,
    Mickey Mouse’s Birthday Party
    .
  • Jack Wagner, the voice of Disneyland, often did Mickey’s voice for various theme park-related events like parades and announcements. Pete Renoudet filled in after Wagner passed away performing these same duties.
  • Carl Stalling and Clarence “Ducky” Nash stepped in during the early cartoons to cover a line or two. Nash also did Mickey’s voice for television commercials in 1955.
  • Les Perkins did the voice of Mickey in the 1987 television special
    Down and Out With Donald Duck
    as well as in
    DTV Valentine
    in 1986.
  • Quinton Flynn did Mickey’s voice in some episodes of the 1999 television series
    Mickey Mouse Works
    .
BOOK: The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse
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