A MOUSE FOR ALL SEASONS

Today is the 80th birthday of a little guy named---


I have described my first encounter with Mickey Mouse elsewhere, but just as, for me, that meeting was the beginning of a life-long fascination with animation so, for Disney, the birth of Mickey Mouse was the advent of a legendary career and set the cornerstone of a vast, worldwide corporation, symbolised by this radiantly-smiling face...


It was on this day in 1928, that the public first witnessed Mickey's antics in a little film called Steamboat Willie...

The cartoon was a spoof on a recent Buster Keaton silent comedy, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and it caused it sensation! This was hardly surprising as it was the first ever cartoon with synchronised sound.

Fate was kind to Walt Disney, since he had already made - but had not yet released - two silent Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and Gallopin' Goucho, when Al Jolson astonished movie-goers by speaking and singing in the epoch-making 'talkie', The Jazz Singer.

Disney - making a decision that demonstrated his entrepreneurial acumen - immediately decided to make a new film for Mickey's debut and to do so in sound. After numerous trials and tribulations, he succeeded and the result was Steamboat Willie.

Who knows how things would have turned out if Mickey had begun his career in a silent movie - history might have been very different --- just, indeed, as things might have taken quite another turn had he stuck with his original idea of calling the character Mortimer Mouse!

Steamboat Willie looks and sounds crude when compared to present-day cinematic expectations, but, in 1928, sheer novelty made up for any lack of sophistication and for Disney and his Mouse fame were assured!

Mickey's original appearance was rather different from the character people are familiar with today from the Disney studio's corporate logo, the walk-around figures in the Disney theme parks and a zillion cuddly toys and other items of merchandise.

Over the years, Mickey has gone through many changes: he lost his tail, became less spiky and more rounded...

He also matured from the impertinent, irreverent little scrap of thing that frequented barnyard and back-alley and became - like Chaplin - a symbolic Everyman character. As such he could, and did, do anything and everything...

In 1940, he even dared to enter Art's Temple and gave - in Fantasia - what is arguable the finest performance of his career as 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice'...


Over the years, Mickey's screen popularity was eventually overtaken by that of Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Chip 'n' Dale and the characters from Disney's feature-length animated films, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Walt - who, for many years, provided Mickey's piping falsetto - always acknowledged his indebtedness to the character: "I hope we never forget," he often said, "that all this started with a mouse!"

Such was Walt Disney's attachment to Mickey that he constantly found ways to rejuvenate his career: appointing him, in the '50s, the genial host of both his newly opened Disneyland park and the weekly '50s television show, The Mickey Mouse Club...


Even though Disney himself is long gone, the studio has continued to keep Mickey's reputation alive: casting him in 1983 as Ebenezer Scrooge's put-once clerk in the Dickensian fantasy Mickey's Christmas Carol...


And, in 1995, once again coaxing him back in front of the cameras for a wild little pseudo-science-horror film, entitled The Runaway Brain...

The Mouse simply keeps on going and a digitally-animated Mickey is now entertaining pre-schoolites in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

So, 80 years on - without a sign of a white hair on his little round head - what can we say, but...

Happy Birthday, Mr Mouse!

I was on Radio 4's Today programme this morning talking about Mickey's career. You can listen again here; and you can read a lot more of what I said about the Mouse on the Today website - a page that, apparently, received 50,000 hits on its first day...


Images: © Disney