A YouTube trailer of the first, called Mickey’s Mouse Trap, was released scant hours after the expiry of the copyright and showed a human in a Mickey mask terrorising a group of teenagers in an amusement arcade, while the accompanying onscreen text read: ‘A place for fun. A place for friendship. A place for hunting. The Mouse is out.’
‘We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it’s… Mickey Mouse murdering people,’ the movie’s director was quoted as saying.
For the second Mickey-the-Menace movie, as yet untitled, the film’s tagline on social media reads, ‘A late-night boat ride turns into a desperate fight for survival in New York City when a mischievous mouse becomes a monstrous reality.’
Both movies draw their sinister inspiration from Mickey’s 1928 debut in the short film, Steamboat Willy, in which the protagonist looked more like a ferrety rat than the cuddly mouse of his later avatar, wearing his hallmark red shorts, bright yellow shoes, and insouciant grin.
The proto-Mickey of Steamboat Willy had an elongated snout and was the captain of a steamer in which he stored bizarre musical instruments made from animal bones.Mickey was turned from a repellent rat – idiomatically, a ‘rat’ is a betrayer of associates; rats carried the bubonic plague which annihilated half of medieval Europe – to a cute mouse. Think the Dormouse who keeps falling asleep at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland, or Robert Burns’ ‘wee timorous beastie’. The metamorphosis was a masterstroke, in part inspired by Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin, the jaunty Little Tramp, was ‘a kind of godfather to Mickey’. As Disney himself put it: ‘We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a little bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin…a little fellow trying to do the best he could.’
Like Chaplin, Mickey became a quixotic David, foiling giant Goliaths like the huge cat, Pegleg Pete, and other badasses. In a twist of poetic irony, the baddest badass of all, whom Chaplin lampooned in The Great Dictator, was an ardent fan of the Mouseketeer.
On December 22, 1937, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘I give the Leader twelve Mickey Mouse films for Christmas…he is very excited and quite happy about this treasure that will hopefully bring him much joy and relaxation.’
The Deutsche Zeichentrichfilme (DZF), the Reich’s cine propaganda machine, sought to emulate and outdo Hollywood in the art of animation filmmaking. Its graphic artists used Mickey as a template, and Mickey face masks became popular collectables, along with Swastikas and other Nazi memorabilia.
On the other side of the ideological divide, Mickey had a communist clone called Cheburashka, created in 1965 by cartoonist Eduard Uspensky, who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While dictators and dictatorships would come and go, Mickey would go on forever. Along with his significant other, Minnie Mouse, and pooch pal, Pluto, Mickey starred in over 150 films, apart from a regular TV show and a comic strip that ran for 45 years. Ten of his films won Academy nominations, and one got the Oscar in 1941.
In 1978, Mickey became the first cartoon character awarded the coveted Star in Hollywood’s Hall of Fame.
However, superstardom has its flipside, possibly arising from envy, and the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ has come to denote anyone or anything trivial and of little or no consequence. As in a Mickey Mouse banana republic.
Will Mickey’s co-option into slasher movie rip-offs morph him into a harum-scare’em appendix to the rat race? Fuhrer forbid. Achtung!