Mickey Mouse Turns 90

A tribute to Walt Disney with Mickey drawing his portrait...

November 8 is the 90th birthday of Mickey Mouse who made his debut in Steamboat Willie in 1928. And The Walt Disney Archives is touring around the world showing off only a fraction of its artefacts of the famous mouse. Almost 90 items are now on show at The Times Square Piazza in Causeway Bay until October 31.

I managed to get a very quick preview minus the hordes of people...

An original doll Charlotte Clark created

There's reproduction of animation drawings, comic books about Mickey Mouse in Chinese printed in Hong Kong in 1972, a Mickey Mouse watch and a Standard Oil Map of the United States and children could collect Mickey Mouse cards at Standard Oil gas stations.

Two things we found particularly interesting thanks to information provided by Robert Maxhimer, exhibition manager of the Walt Disney Archives.

First is the one of the original Mickey Mouse stuffed dolls designed by Charlotte Clark. According to Maxhimer, she was a big fan of the mouse and made her own stuffed version of Mickey Mouse in the early 1930s and showed it to the Disney Studio. She got permission to make the dolls and produced some 200 of them, all sewn by hand.

But then demand was so great that she came up with the idea of designing the pattern so that people could make their own Mickey Mouse doll.

Walt and Roy Disney were so impressed with the doll that they rented a building near the studio and called it the Doll House where Clark and six other seamstresses churned out 300 to 400 dolls per week.

Mickey with the sorcerer Yen Sid in a drawing of Fantasia

The next interesting bit of trivia is about Fantasia. It's one of Maxhimer's all time favourite Mickey Mouse films and he explained the Sorcerer's Apprentice was based on Goethe's 1797 poem Der Zauberlehring.

In the animation, Mickey is apprentice to sorcerer Yen Sid, which is Disney spelled backwards...

By the way on November 8 this year, The Walt Disney Archives will have a pop-up exhibition in New York's Meatpacking District with over 200 items on display.