 (The 7th Level) | Mickey
Mouse (1928 - )
Animal
Outfit: Red shorts / Yellow suspender buttons (sans suspenders) / Yellow pauper's shoes / White gloves Tagline: "Oh boy! That's Swell!" Plot summary: On his way home by train, after having been fired from producing Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoons AND being told he had no rights to the character, a twenty-seven year old dreamer named Walt Disney sketched a picture of a walking, talking mouse on a cocktail napkin. He named him Mortimer. He showed it to his wife when he got home, and she insisted he instead name him Mickey. Seventy-six years later, and we're still having to endure his eunuch voice, sickening optimism, and refusal to commit to the one woman he's been dating for the past seventy-five FUCKING YEARS. Mickey was the first cartoon character to be franchised and mass-marketed. Within a couple of years of his first short, Steamboat Willie (the first cartoon with full sound, music, and speech), the mouse's bug-eyed, phallic-nosed visage could be seen everywhere from dolls to watches to female sexual aides. In the 80's, he entered the world of electronic gaming with a less than successful, mostly forgotten NES title, then moved on to three highly successful Genesis titles (Castle Of Illusion, Fantasia, and World Of Illusion.) Most recently, he garnered a starring role in the phenomenal Disney/Square Kingdom Hearts Series as "King Mickey." This mass-marketing practice was the model for all future cartoon merchandise tie-ins ever afterwards. So for you parents out there having to suffer through finding the latest Pokemon character, you know what rat to blame. (more) User Comments: Walt envisioned Mickey as a down-on-his-luck guy who never got things right, but always came out on top in the end. He was so poor that he couldn't even afford a shirt (unless he was always giving them off of his back in nice guy fashion.) For years, all he wore were a pair of red hip hugger shorts with brass suspender buttons on the front. But the poor rodent was too poor to afford suspenders! And don't even get me started about this rat's feet. At first, he didn't even wear shoes. Why should he? In some of his earliest incarnations, he didn't even have toes! Just arches. Really HIGH arches. His feet looked like blackened, curled toothpicks. Sometime in the forties, Mickey plumped out a bit, and so did his feet. I believe to this day that the mouse has the worst case of the gout I have ever seen. His feet are constantly swollen and resemble black, inflated surgical gloves. It's no wonder that he has to wear shoes that look like socks with shoe features painted on them! This nice guy/poor guy image persisted from Steamboat Willie through the Mickey Mouse Club, and all the way up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And then, not too long ago, a change was made. Right around the time that his new show, Mickey's House of Mouse, was released, Mickey turned towards more of a Warner Brothers-inspired, slapstick approach. He more easily lost his temper. He laughed in that grating falsetto as he played pranks on his friends. Instead of being a guy always on the edge of going broke, he now owns his own theater, the master of his own domain. Gone are the simple red shorts and yellow "shocks." Now, he dresses in fucking Armani suits. And on his off days, he can usually be found wearing golfing attire! As for his changed attitude, oh sure, he showed some of the old sickening sentimentality in his most recent film, "Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas" (his first full-length feature done in complete CGI animation) but only after spending a small fortune on Christmas decorations, and throwing Pluto out and accusing him of ruining Christmas for accidentally trashing his financial excesses. Only after his dog runs away does he realize what a colossal dick he's become and goes looking for him, realizing the folly of his massive short-comings in hind sight. In other words, the old Mickey was based on Walt himself. The new Mickey is based on Michael Eisner. This is not the Mickey that so many grew up with. This is Mickey X, the rat of a new generation. (more) User Rating:
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