The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (6 page)

That incomplete list doesn’t include the many foreign voice artists who supplied Mickey’s voice in German, Japanese, Italian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages over the decades.

A talented and humorous natural performer, Walt Disney was the very first person to supply voices for Disney animated cartoons. He used his theatrical skills to bring an extra dimension to Mickey’s personality. As Walt told interviewer Tony Thomas in 1959:

We were foolin’ around and tryin’ to get a voice for a mouse. And we didn’t know what a mouse would sound like, so I said, “It’s kind of like this.” And the guys said “Well, why don’t you do it?” And I knew I’d always be on the payroll so [laughs] I did it.

Walt’s vocal characterization of Mickey is the only existing evidence of his remarkable acting ability, which was usually witnessed only by his artists at the lively story meetings held at the Disney Studio. Playful Walt would often ad-lib dialog for lovable Mickey in that well-known voice resulting in appreciative laughter from his listeners.

Walt told an interviewer:

He [Mickey Mouse] still speaks for me and I still speak for him. In
Steamboat Willie
(1928), in addition to speaking for Mickey, I also supplied a few sound effects for Minnie, his girlfriend, as well as the sarcastic squawking dialogue of Captain Pete’s annoying parrot.

While
Steamboat Willie
has Mickey vocalizing his many feelings, the character’s first words were not uttered until
The Karnival Kid
(1929). That historic moment showcased carnival hot dog vendor Mickey gleefully shouting “Hot dog! Hot dog!” (Not “hot dogs!” plural, as many others have claimed.)

At one point, Walt felt his Midwestern twang and lack of professional acting experience might hamper Mickey Mouse’s success, so he spent a week auditioning professional actors to take over the part. Despite Walt’s impassioned coaching and the best efforts of these performers, no one was able to capture Mickey’s intrepid optimism and pluck as deftly as Walt himself. He told others that he preferred his unique vocal interpretation because “there is more pathos in it.”

Disney Legend Les Clark said:

Walt was Mickey and Mickey was Walt. Even Mickey’s gestures were copied from Walt when he performed Mickey.

Bob Thomas, author of
Walt Disney: An American Original
, explained:

It was no easy matter to get color into such an unnatural, limited voice, but Walt managed. No one else could capture the gulping, ingenuous, half-brave quality. Walt’s depiction of Mickey was so accurate, so inspired, that animators wished they could capture the Disney facial expressions and movements to help them with animating Mickey.

A famous clip from
The Pointer
(1939) features a frightened Mickey as a hunter who is overshadowed by a growling, threatening bear. Mickey tries to calm the situation by nervously stuttering: “Well, I’m, uh, Mickey Mouse. You know? Mickey Mouse? I hope you’ve heard of me, I hope.”

There is a wonderful story behind that short clip of dialog. Animator Frank Thomas had finally convinced Walt to be filmed for a short sequence to help the animators, who were having challenges coming up with appropriate actions for surprised hunter Mickey as he confronted an angry bear. Thomas recalled:

Walt didn’t want to be in front of a camera when he was doing the voice of Mickey Mouse. Finally, he told me, “If you’re way back in the booth over there and I can’t see you, well, I guess so.” When he recorded the voice he couldn’t help but feel like Mickey and he added all these little gestures that were spontaneous with him. At one point [when he said, “you know? Mickey Mouse?”], he put out his hand like this [to indicate that Mickey was three feet tall], it was the only time we knew how big Walt thought Mickey was.

While that memorable piece of live-action film no longer exists, film restoration expert Scott McQueen discovered a clip over a decade ago in the dusty Disney vaults that shows Walt and voice artist Billy Bletcher (also known for the gruff tones of the Big Bad Wolf) doing several takes for a sequence of Mickey Mouse being interrogated by the villainous Pete on a train for
Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip
(1940). The film records Walt professionally performing the flustery falsetto and shy giggle for multiple takes of the dialog. (It’s also fun to see Walt’s lips moving as he reads Bletcher’s lines silently to himself.)

It was almost impossible to imagine anyone else supplying the distinctive dialog for Walt’s alter ego. However, as the Disney Studio expanded, it became harder and harder for busy Walt to schedule time to go to the soundstage to record the vocal tracks and the changes in dialog as a film was in production. Disney producer Harry Tytle explained:

Part of Walt’s preference for sparing use of dialog [with Mickey Mouse] could have been that it was less time consuming for him, for as most Disney buffs are aware, Walt was the original voice of Mickey Mouse. In later years, others did the voice, but we also had a film library of Walt’s Mickey Mouse lines to fall back on. Walt was generally so involved in other work that he was not available on short notice. Then, too, the falsetto voice was not an easy thing for him to do in later years.

Wayne Allwine, one of the official voices for Mickey Mouse, concurred:

Walt was a high baritone. His constant smoking dried out his vocal chords over time so it brought down the pitch and you could hear the difference.

In 1934, Jimmy MacDonald was playing drums and percussion in a jazz band that was used by the Disney Studio to record music for a Mickey Mouse short. After the recording was over, Walt Disney was so impressed with MacDonald’s versatility that he hired him to form a sound effects department.

MacDonald invented many of theDisney sound effects himself, building the necessary contraptions in his home workshop. He built more than five hundred different devices from scratch. MacDonald said:

I was never onstage very much when Walt was doing Mickey. He might come down while I was doing effects, and they suddenly needed some Mickey [dialog], and maybe it was the only time he had.

Often, animators would be delayed in their work because they didn’t have Walt’s voice track to animate, but Walt was becoming busier and busier with the many responsibilities of running his studio. In addition, Walt’s chain smoking was giving his Mickey voice a harshness not appropriate for the young character and requiring more takes to capture just the right tone.

Jimmy MacDonald remembered:

Being on staff, you were asked to do bits of everything. For instance, on
Cinderella
(1950), I did the two mice, Jaq and Gus. It was something that I’d never tried before; we just thought we’d try it because I was on staff, and if I could do it, it would save having to pay actors to come in. Storyman Winston Hibler had written a lot of strange jargon — he called it “Mouse Latin”, an unintelligible language. The one mouse we had to speed up a bit, and the other one we slowed down. When that was cut into a rough cut, and shown to the people here, everybody loved the picture, and they loved the mice.

MacDonald was also the voice of another mouse, the dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland
(1951), for which he recorded his voice at double speed and then played it back.

While MacDonald invented the voices for those mice, he inherited the most important mouse voice for the Big Cheese himself when Walt finally was too overwhelmed with other work.

Walt originally recorded Mickey’s dialog for
Mickey and the Beanstalk
in May 1940, but production on the film was continually delayed for five years and the story frequently rewritten, which meant that Walt had to return to the sound stage over the years to record the new lines. Jimmy MacDonald recalled how this led to his opportunity of a lifetime:

When I started doing Mickey’s voice we were doing ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ [a segment from
Fun and Fancy Free
(1947)], and the animators and the director in charge of the sequences that needed Walt’s voice on Mickey approached him and said, “Walt, we need you on the stage; we want to go ahead with this.” He said, “‘I’m too busy, I just can’t do it. Call Jim up here.”

They said, “Walt wants to see you,” and I thought, “What have I done now?” He said, “Have you ever tried to do Mickey?” I said, “No, Walt.” You wouldn’t try to do that, because it was always Walt’s voice; there was no reason ever to try it. So he said, “Do it. Just say something.” So I said (in Mickey’s voice), “Hi, Walt, how are you?” You know, Mickey always had that little identifiable giggle.

A test recording was done of MacDonald trying to match the vocal track Walt had done five years earlier. When the tracks were compared, Walt was pleased that MacDonald had captured Mickey’s spirit and limited vocal range. As MacDonald remembered:

Walt said, “That’s fine.” He told the directors, “Have Jim do it, in the future. He can do it fine.” But, he told me, “Don’t let them give you long speeches. Because you have that falsetto, and you have a couple of inches of area for inflection, and it’d be terrible to have a long speech in falsetto voice. You don’t have much room for inflection; you’re already up there. And if you get too low, you start to yodel, and yodel right out of it.” So it was always best, he said, to have short speeches.

Harry Tytle said:

Wile supplying the voice for Mickey Mouse could give one “bragging rights” within the studio, it carried little prestige. Jimmy [MacDonald], while certainly talented, and who performed the voice well, was primarily called upon because he was already on salary, and his voice didn’t add to the film’s cost.

MacDonald fondly remembered:

One day I was doing something and Walt came on the dialog stage. As he turned to leave, he turned around to the fellow at the soundboard and said, “Hey, don’t forget I do Mickey’s voice, too.”

In fact, in the mid-1950s, Walt stepped in and recorded Mickey’s voice for the daily introductions on the
Mickey Mouse Club
television show — almost a decade after he had officially stopped doing the voice.

MacDonald only provided Mickey’s voice in less than a dozen cartoons for movie theaters before the final theatrically released Mickey Mouse short,
The Simple Things
(1953). He had to convey the more sedate fatherly tones of a mature, suburban Mickey in cartoons like
Mickey and the Seal
(1948) and
Pluto’s Christmas Tree
(1952). Fortunately, there were many other opportunities, including the Disney television shows, commercials, records, and special projects that required MacDonald to use his skills in vocalizing Mickey.

However, MacDonald always felt that his main job was running the sound effects department.

Just a few months before Walt Disney died in 1966, twenty-year-old Wayne Allwine was hired for a job in the mail room at The Walt Disney Studios. From there, he worked briefly in Wardrobe, then moved to Audio Post Production and eventually began a seven-and-a-half year apprenticeship under MacDonald, where he won awards for his sound-effects editing. Allwine sometimes referred to himself as the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

When MacDonald decided to retire in 1976, the Disney Studio searched for a replacement to provide Mickey’s voice. Allwine recalled:

They were re-voicing Mickey in 1977. Somebody missed their audition appointment. So they called the Music Department where I worked and said, “Send the kid down if it’s okay. We have a space here, and we want to put a name on the list.” I’d never done anything like that before and didn’t expect to ever do it again. A couple of months later, Disney executive Lou Debney stopped me on Mickey Avenue on the studio lot and said, “You’ve got to join the Screen Actors Guild, kid. They’re going to use you.”

Besides working with MacDonald for so many years, Allwine had strong memories of the voice of Mickey from the original
Mickey Mouse Club
television show that he had watched avidly as a youngster. He easily got the part and made his vocal debut on
The New Mickey Mouse Club
(1977-1978), and went on to provide Mickey’s voice for Disney theme parks, movies, television specials, records, and video games for over three decades.

“Just remember, kid,” Jimmy Macdonald told Allwine with a smile, “you’re only filling in for the boss.”

Allwine’s premiere theatrical vocal appearance as Mickey Mouse was in
Mickey’s Christmas Carol
(1983), the first new Mickey Mouse animated cartoon released to movie theaters in thirty years. In that film, Allwine not only had to recreate Mickey’s distinctive voice but also convey Mickey’s acting skills as Bob Crachit, the browbeaten clerk of the stingy Mr. Scrooge.

Over the years, Allwine continued to expand Mickey’s dramatic repertoire by singing in
The Prince and the Pauper
(1990) and performing as an enormous monster in
Runaway Brain
(1995).

Allwine was heard constantly as Mickey in everything from new cartoon horts for the television series
Mickey Mouse Works
(1999) and
Disney’s House of Mouse
(2001) to popular video games like the
Kingdom Hearts
series that began in 2002.

Wayne Allwine died on May 18, 2009. The last Disney product to feature his voice work, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, has a dedication to his memory.

Allwine said:

Mickey is an actor and he’s capable of doing whatever he’s given to do — provided it’s kept in context of what Mickey would and wouldn’t do. Walt always has been very much alive in Mickey Mouse and we try to direct him more toward Walt’s version of Mickey who was an actor, forever young and forever optimistic. Mickey is Walt’s. I’m just filling in for the boss, too. Mickey’s the star. I get to take this wonderful American icon and keep it alive until the next Mickey comes along. That is what is heart-breaking about this job. I am “Number Three” so it means that someday there will be a “Number Four”.

The Disney Company was already looking for an understudy to provide Mickey’s instantly recognizable voice. The man selected was Bret Iwan, who won the role after a nationwide search.

Born September 10, 1982, Iwan graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and began his career as an illustrator for Hallmark in Kansas City where he worked for five years after graduation.