Vintage Mickey – DVD

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Steamboat Willie (1928), Plane Crazy (1928), The Karnival Kid (1929), The Birthday Party (1931), The Castaway (1931), Mickey’s Orphans (1931), Mickey’s Revue (1932), Building a Building (1933), Mickey’s Steam-Roller (1934)

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The difference between Disney and Warner Bros. animation isn’t exactly the standard business vs. art dichotomy–it’s about the smoothing over of rough spots vs. the celebration of their interruptions. Where the whole point of Looney Tunes was to affirm the thing that caused the chaos, Disney either healed that thing or pretended like it didn’t really matter. But before the battle of the trademarks began in earnest, there were only the shorts, and Disney’s M.O. was simply to provide a salve–not through the personality cult of its sadly conservative mastermind, but through the reduction of things that can hurt. The new compilation “Vintage Mickey” is thus bittersweet occasion to look through the prism of the company’s semi-fascistic present at the apparent innocence of the beginning and wonder where it all went wrong.

Before the ideology of family entertainment, there was a happy-go-lucky mouse who blithely squeezed lemonade from lemons when crises arose. In his debut, the black-and-white Steamboat Willie, deck-swabber Mickey finds a goat eating sheet music; faced with Minnie’s panic, he swings into action by making a symphony out of animals. His musical improv talents figure heavily into most of the shorts: The Birthday Party, for example, has Mickey piano-riffing at a surprise party that devolves into dancing and gentle mayhem. As he protects a piano from an onslaught of overzealous island animals (The Castaway) or uses a pair of cats to serenade Minnie (The Karnival Kid) or puts on a musical revue (Mickey’s Revue), we see music as a healing power and a source of solace–the sort of solace that Disney would later distill into a narcotic and sell at a premium.

Yet this yearning for solace pointedly shows a bow-and-scrape mindset. Warner Bros. is an adolescent looking for a window to smash, deploying cruel retributive justice as a means of demolishing authority. Mickey, meanwhile, is about living in authority’s shadow: he’s never the person in charge, but he’s always the one who steps up to the plate. A rather malevolent cat appears a few times (he typically runs the steamboat, carnival, or building site (as in the Academy Award-nominated Building a Building)), and he’s mean at best and lecherous at worst; it’s up to Mickey to entertain himself and others while under the cat’s thumb. A litter of orphan cats (another Oscar nominee, Mickey’s Orphans) means a lifestyle change for our hero–Mickey never creates the space for himself. He accommodates and adjusts.

This could be just polite behaviour: after all, Bugs Bunny never did anything more constructive than raise hell in the name of a good time. But it could also be the seeds of something more sinister, a memo from the top that you cannot expect anything more than what you’re handed, and that Mickey Mouse will show you how to make it work in your dreams. There’s nothing explicit–you can still enjoy the soft edges, the sweet temper, and the happy, happy conclusions without feeling guilty. Knowing what we now know, however, we can see where the whole thing dovetailed from innocent entertainment into faux-innocent tyranny: somewhere after giving us a mouse who never talked back and asking us to identify like crazy. Your children probably won’t notice–but then, wasn’t that the point?

THE DVD
Recycling the transfers prepared for their “Walt Disney Treasures” collections, Disney’s presentation of these nine shorts is respectable considering the age of the source material(s), if hardly revelatory. Each cartoon is in its original fullscreen aspect ratio (though some, most obviously Steamboat Willie, are windowboxed within the 1.33:1 frame), and while celluloid artifacts like dust and flicker are mild-to-severe in the earliest selections, the image is at least consistently sharp. The mono sound, mastered but not remixed in Dolby Surround, starts out with a shrillness that, like the print defects, eventually subsides, though no small amount of hiss remains. Trailers for Cinderella, Chicken Little, Old Yeller, and Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch begin on start-up, with additional propaganda and music offers celebrating Disneyland’s 50^th anniversary housed under the main menu’s “previews” option.

65 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; DVD-5; Region One; Disney