The Legacy of Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is now some 80 years old and reputedly the ravages of time have not left a mark on him. 2 makeovers have left him a little rotund and to many a little misshapen.
His main film work seems to have dried up of late and he has not had the offer a movie in over 3 years. He suffered the ignominy of having his last one go direct to video but he has managed to put a brave face on things and indeed that face remains one of the most iconic pictures in the world today even beating Santa to that particular record.
Somewhat unusually Mickey's story started with a rabbit - Oswald the fortunate Rabbit to be accurate. Back in the mists of time Disney siblings Studio was just part Universal Pictures' animation. Walt Disney met the Universal operatives in 1928 with a view to negotiating a new contract. Oswald was still riding high in the charts and Disney assumed that a deal on his terms would be cut and dried. The studio had other concepts and informed him told him that it had hired away all of his workers whilst keeping the entire artistic rights to Oswald. The studio offered to keep Disney on but only if he took an income cut which he of course refused.
He and Ub Iwerks the one animator who stayed steadfast to Disney, started on a session of blue skying sessions burning the midnight oil to come up with a replacement for Oswald.
Mickey Mouse changed into a national icon by the end of the year and it was then that Walt Disney propelled the mouse to true megastar status by starting up a line of Mickey goods and just after the Mickey Mouse Club was formed.
Mickey also appeared in colour for the first time that year.
when that 1937 came around Disney lofts was producing Mickey Mouse shorts at the rate of one a month. Mickey went on to reflect the world in all it's diverse guises, becoming at diverse stages a soccer hero, a hunter, a tailor, and even a symphony conductor. He saved Pluto from the dog pound, crashed his car, slid behind on his rent, enlisted in the regiment and had his place repo'd. By this time his life companion Minnie had arrived on the scene and she was always being captured by dastardly villains always later being saved by Mickey of course, the pinnacle of the all Yank hero.
In the 1950s Mickey had his own theme park and paper comic strip, and he had branched out on to the new emerging medium TV. Sadly for Mickey Mouse, block buster Disney feature films like Bambi and Sleeping Beauty started to take the accolades and poor old Mickey began to fade away.
Yet notwithstanding all this Mickey's ears are still one of the most noted cultural icons of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has posed for pictures with nearly every U.S. President while the sale of Mickey Mouse merchandise have fell from their all time high in 1997 they still make up a staggering 40 percent of the corporation's consumable income.
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