Cranky Mickey, pt. 1

Divided into two parts, because I got carried away and this is seventeen times as long as it should have been:

About fifteen seconds before beginning to write this, some random blog-hopping put me on to this.  For anyone whose RSI prevents them from clicking the link, Disney plans to re-imagine Mickey Mouse.  That's right, in a scene right out of the Manchurian Candidate
(the original with Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, not the flabby remake with Denzel Washington), Mickey Mouse is being treated to a complete personality reprogram.  The new Mickey will be "catankerous and cunning"; his cohorts include a "disembowelled, robotic Donald Duck", and his mission will be to take down Oswald the Rabbit, whose only crime was making Walt Disney famous a full year before anyone came up with Mickey himself.  Seriously, read the article - I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

This is what happens when a corporation hangs on to something beloved for too long.  Remember, Mickey has been around since 1928, and, before the MMPA came about, he was due to be released into the public domain in 2003.  I want to make one thing perfectly clear: the Walt Disney Company refused to release Mickey for one reason only, and that reason was money.  Disney are geniuses in the marketing department.  In 2005, they fired over two thousand of the world's best animators to make room for more merchandising experts, and, despite being flipped the bird by disgruntled parents and disillusioned animators the world over, from a fiscal perspective, the move was not a failure.  After a brief slump that had been on its way for a while anyway, Disney soared back into profitability, and today Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers are just as profitable as the original princesses ever were.  But I digress.

Rather than let Mickey go, they decided to create a reason for people to find him exciting again.  In 1999, the year after the MMPA was pushed through, a series of Mickey-centric straight-to-video movies, as well as his own new television series, "Mickey Mouse Works".  The latter was passable watching.  In 2002, the year before he should have been released to the public domain, he was featured in Kingdom Hearts.  Great game; I loved it, and it would have been a fitting swansong for Mickey's days with Disney.  Note, though - nothing whatsoever would have prevented Square Enix from continuing to use Mickey's image in subsequent KH games had he been released into the PD; it may even have substantially dropped the games' budgets.  Indeed, in order to extend Mickey's role into something a little more badass, the creator of the Kingdom Hearts series, Tetsuya Nomura, had to acquire express permission from Disney.

Read that again.  Nomura had to grovel on bended knee to make Mickey a cooler character, to the same people who turned him into a badly-rendered, lobotomised version of his former self for "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" in 2006, and now want to make him "catankerous and cunning".

The funny thing is, I don't even mind Mickey's re-programming that much; at least not more than I mind what's been done to him for countless shows aimed at intellectually-deficient three-year-olds.  During his time at Disney, Mickey has been given countless personality makeovers.  In the original cartoons of the late twenties and early thirties, Mickey was mischievous, roguish, and a bit of a ladies' man.  He was a carefree symbol for an America just emerging from the Great Depression, and originally he was aimed at adults, not children.  Being a genius marketer, Disney just made him fairly inoffensive to widen his market base.  So in a way, the new catankerous Mickey is a return to form.  Knowing Disney, they stopped well short of him fusing brains with Fritz the Cat in a headlong dive through the windshield during a drunk driving accident on his way home from a brothel.  So big deal.

What really both intrigues and infuriates me is Disney's treatment of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was basically an early draft of Mickey Mouse (link takes you to his Wikipedia).  Indeed, except that Oswald's ears are longer, the two could be identical twins.  In the video game in which the new, cantankerous Mickey (and from now on I'm just going to call him Cranky Mickey) is set to debut, Oswald plays a disillusioned Disney ex-pat, who, jealous of Mickey's success, tries to sabotage him and ends up in a "'cartoon wasteland', populated by Disney's retired creations".

Now, I'm not one to go all conspiracy-theorist, and, despite studying Shakespeare fairly extensively, I'm pretty good at not ascribing deeper meaning where none was deeply meant.  But, whether accidentally or deliberately on the part of the game's creators (and dear God, I hope it was deliberate because that makes it so much cooler), this is a brilliant, acerbic commentary on Disney's attitude to copyright.  Read on to find out why; until then, this is Copyright Cat, signing off.