M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E: The century’s most durable star

Bob Thomas

Tuesday, Oct. 5, 1999 | 9:47 a.m.

BURBANK, Calif. -- As with all veteran movie stars, his career has experienced spectacular highs and serious lows. He's had facelifts and makeovers, and survived the advent of both sound and television. He's had co-stars upstage him and handlers neglect him for other projects.

Yet, after 71 years, he remains the longest-lasting Hollywood star of all. His movies still attract an audience, he has a merchandising deal to die for and is still married to the same gal.

Who is this star of yesterday, today and tomorrow?

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E !

Although his Oscar-winning heyday came with a series of classic shorts in the 1930s and '40s Mickey Mouse has always been with us. His grinning face has appeared on billions of T-shirts, ties, toys, watches, notebooks and countless other pieces of merchandise. Tail and all, he remains the corporate icon for the multibillion-dollar Walt Disney empire.

He serves as the silent host at the Disney theme parks from Paris to Tokyo. The humans inside the Mickey suits are not allowed to talk to their guests. It's the studio's way of preserving the integrity of that cheery falsetto voice first provided by Walt himself in 1929 on the scratchy soundtrack of "Steamboat Willie."

Right up there with John Travolta as a comeback kid, Mickey now reigns on Saturday morning television with "Disney's Mickey MouseWorks," to the delight of a fourth generation of young fans.

Walt Disney once acknowledged the difficulty of analyzing the appeal of his creation, but added, "Mickey is so simple and uncomplicated, so easy to understand, that you can't help liking him."

Leonard Maltin, author of "The Disney Films" and historian-reviewer for "Entertainment Tonight," agrees:

"He exudes such cheerfulness, he is indomitable, he is the unsinkably happy character we all wish we could be. There is just something irresistibly likable about him, likable to the degree that kids who haven't even seen his films find his image appealing."

No one remains who was present at the birth of Mickey Mouse in 1928. The last survivor, Walt's widow Lillian, who is said to have changed the name from Mortimer to Mickey, died in December 1997.

Mickey's beginnings are clouded in legend; Walt, the great storyteller, liked to improve on the tale with each recital. But the basic facts are these:

Walt and Lilly were returning to California from New York City, where his distributor had stolen the Disney series, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit," and hired away most of the studio's animators. Walt decided on a mouse character, since mice had never starred in movie cartoons.

Walt and his animation whiz, Ub Iwerks, devised the appearance of Mickey, who was not much different from Oswald except for round instead of floppy ears. Working at fever pitch, Iwerks animated three silent shorts starring the mouse -- "Plane Crazy," "Steamboat Willie" and "Gallopin' Gaucho."

Suddenly the sound revolution swept Hollywood. Walt decided to put a few sound effects and lines of dialogue and a musical score to "Steamboat Willie." Film distributors displayed little interest, but an engagement at New York's Colony Theater on Nov. 18, 1928 aroused a sensation. Mickey Mouse soon was known around the world.

Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were not present at Mickey's creation, but they brought the mouse to life during his heyday in the 1930s. Both 86, they have been best friends for most of their lives.

California-born, they met as undergraduate students at Stanford University, and studied at Los Angeles' Chouinard Art Institute, which had a close relationship with Disney. In 1934 Thomas started at the studio as an in-betweener (filling in the moves between the animators' key drawings). Johnston followed in 1935.

They went on to become two of the famed "Nine Old Men" who created the Disney animated classics, and later the subject of the documentary feature, "Frank and Ollie." They and their wives remain neighbors in a leafy suburb about 15 minutes from the Disney cartoon factory in Burbank.

The pair recently talked about the popular rodent and his heady career.

"What they generally say is, 'Ub did the drawings and Walt put in the soul,' " Johnston said. "Walt was enough of an animator himself that he knew what had to be in the voice. His delivery had real personality and emotion; he knew what the character was thinking."

Thomas recalled one occasion when Disney agreed to be photographed while recording Mickey's lines. "We copied Walt's movements when we animated because he was so much into the character," Thomas said.

Indeed, after Disney's death in 1966, his widow said she cried every time she saw Mickey Mouse, "because there's so much of Walt in him."

Like Johnston and Thomas, Disney worked on Mickey around the studio's animated feature projects -- including the legendary "Snow White" and "Pinocchio" -- and the distractions started to take their toll on the little mouse.

"When Walt became involved in the features, he was too busy to put enough of himself into Mickey," Thomas remarked. "It got to the point that you'd listen to a story and say, 'That's great!' But it lost something in animation.

"That's where Walt used to be so strong: sweat-boxing everything (critiquing rough animation in a hot projection room), picking out little gestures and nuances that made the story come to life."

"Mickey began to lose the personality that made him popular," Johnston added. "It was hard to work with this guy, who used his brain when he was in trouble. He wouldn't give up until he found something to do, just as he did with the giant in 'Brave Little Tailor."'

By the late 1930s the Mickey Mouse craze cooled. The earnest little star with the big ears was being upstaged by his more comical second bananas -- Donald Duck, Pluto and Goofy. His name even entered the vernacular as another word for makeshift. Yet Disney's affection for his first star never waned; he often remarked to his workers: "Never forget this studio was built by a mouse." (Even today insiders fondly -- or not so fondly -- refer to the Walt Disney Co. as "The Mouse Factory.")

Disney provided a comeback role for Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice in "Fantasia." That sequence and the Nutcracker Suite will be included along with six new ones in "Fantasia 2000," opening in theaters early next year.

A featurette, "Mickey and the Beanstalk," appeared as part of "Fun and Fancy Free" in 1947 but thereafter Mickey was mostly relegated to supporting roles for the studio's comedians ... until television.

While much of Hollywood shuddered at the new medium, Disney embraced it with an afternoon program called "The Mickey Mouse Club." Before long the fallen star was back on top and mouse ears were sprouting on the heads of baby boomers across America. A generation later the formula was repeated with "The New Mickey Mouse Club" on the Disney Channel.

In the beginning animators considered Mickey easy to draw because he consisted of circles: the head, the ears, the round body. John Hench, long a Disney studio philosopher, theorizes that circles appeal to primordial human instincts, and he cites the round shapes of prehistoric talismans.

"There's a theory that closed circles give people a feeling of comfort," the animator Johnston said.

And his colleague Thomas recalls Disney once remarking: "Put a half-dozen toys including Mickey in front of a baby who can't even talk yet, and he will always reach for Mickey."

As the Disney animation grew more sophisticated, so did Mickey. In the 1940sthe brilliant animator Fred Moore modernized Mickey with a fedora, fancy duds and a more expressive face. But Walt Disney vetoed one of the sketches that showed Mickey without a tail. "Don't forget: He's still a mouse," Disney chided.

Ward Kimball is another of the Nine Old Men, named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's derision of the New Deal-busting Supreme Court.

"He was easy to draw," Kimball says of Mickey, "but something's wrong with the big ears. Real mouse ears flop forward. No matter how Mickey turned, these two round balls moved back and forth on his head.

"People making statues of Mickey didn't want those round balls on his head. They tried all kinds of things, but none of them looked like Mickey."

Andreas Deja, who represents the new crop of Mickey animators, also faced the problem of Mickey's ears. Deja is responsible for Mickey's cameo appearance in 1988's "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and he animated Mickey in the featurette "The Prince and the Pauper" (1990), and "Runaway Brain" (1995) -- the first new Mickey Mouse short in 42 years.

"Mickey seems easy to animate," Deja says, "but once you study him, all of a sudden a whole world of subtlety comes through. For instance, the ears don't work in perspective; they're always flat, they slide from left to right and back again. Somehow that works. Why, I don't have a clue."

Now Mickey Mouse has returned to his beginnings: the Saturday matinee.

In May the Disney-owned ABC network introduced "Disney's Mickey MouseWorks" to Saturday television, with healthy ratings. It began its second season Sept. 11.

"This is the first Mickey TV series using original material; the whole show is new," Roberts Gannaway, who is co-executive producer with Tony Craig, said.

"It is a variety show including Donald Duck, Goofy and other Disney characters, so they have a sort of neighborhood inspired by Toon Town (in 'Roger Rabbit')."

Craig added: "Content-wise we were trying to give Mickey back a little bit of his scamp or mischievous quality. ... Having become an icon sort of diluted his character. We wanted to put some of that back."

Mickey is doing better than any human star. He has a network deal, a new movie heading to theaters worldwide and a mascot job that will probably survive a millennium's worth of corporate mergers.

And so the little mouse with no-flop ears marches into another century of stardom -- tail intact.

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