...."Companies at times let a character linger because they are not sure what to do with it and fear going the wrong way," said Avi Arad, CEO of Marvel, which has revived its classic Spiderman character. "So they do nothing. Mickey right now doesn't have a dialogue. He's not carrying any banners. Maybe right now he doesn't stand for anything but nostalgia. Nostalgia is fine, but it is not enough."
Whose nostalgia it is makes a crucial difference. Some marketers said that these days, Mickey merchandise is mostly bought by parents - an ominous sign. Martin Brochstein, executive editor of the Licensing Letter, calls Mickey "irrelevant to a huge generational chunk that grew up on `Sesame Street' or Nickelodeon but really had no contact with Mickey unless they went to one of the theme parks." According to Cindy Levitt, vice president of Hot Topic, a mall-based fashion retailer, kids themselves are buying clothing featuring SpongeBob and, of all things, the Care Bears. To be popular with today's hipster teens and 20-somethings, she said, a character "has to have originated in their youth. It has to be from the 1980's." Mickey, she added, doesn't "register" with her clients. "He's too old. He's their parents' character."
....as the moviegoing public's taste for shorts diminished, Mickey had fewer animated outlets; he appeared in 118 cartoons before 1960 but in only two thereafter. Disney managed to keep him before the public by having him "play" other characters: Jack in "Mickey and the Beanstalk," for instance, or Bob Cratchit in "Mickey's Christmas Carol." But in the process he shed what was left of his own story. What replaced it, said Jim Hardison, creative director of Character - a company that "revitalizes" icons like Popeye and the Rice Krispies spokes-toons Snap, Crackle and Pop - was the story of Disney itself.
"If I was looking for the crossover point where Mickey's story morphed into the Disney story, it was `The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' " said Mr. Hardison, referring to the Mickey segment of Disney's 1940 classic, "Fantasia," in which the mouse, as an aspiring magician, attempts to harness his master's tricks. "That's where he cemented his place as the source of Disney magic. Magic is such an important characteristic of Disney, but it wasn't an important characteristic of Mickey. Once he becomes magical, he is no longer the everyman underdog. He went from being the little guy against the world to a symbol of what Disney does."
Article comments
1 - jadester
Mickey is a cartoon character firmly targeted at kids. Why the hell does he even ened a detailed biography? I know i didn't care about all that when i was a kid, i just wanted to watch funny cartoons. I also watched the likes of Tom And Jerry, Bugs Bunny et al. None of which had detailed back stories - it's hardly what you look for in a cartoon when you're about 10 years old.
2 - Bill Sherman
Except . . . as originally presented in the black-&-white cartoons, the Mouse was an everyman figure: the little guy often at odds with brutish authority figures (large cat Pegleg Pete) who was meant to be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. At one point in his career, he and Charlie Chaplin were the two most recognized figures in popular entertainment world-wide.
But even in the cartoons produced by the studio during the peak of animation shorts, you can see Mickey becoming less and less of a player in Disney 'toons. As he teamed up with Donald Duck & Goofy or started to lose more and more screentime to his dog Pluto, Mickey lost out to the more comically flawed leads. Fantasia may've given him a momentary burst of new movie recognition, but I've long thought that the Duck could've done more with the part.
I'd say, looking at his career, that the Mouse peaked in the 1930's. . .