Claire Huxtable singing alongside Ed the Hyena whilst Roger Rabbit and the Keatons all gallivant around and Frasier sits at the bar….yep, nothing but normalcy here.
There's an episode of that "What a Cartoon" podcast which joked how Roger Rabbit was an attempt to gaslight kids into thinking cartoons were real and "filmed" like a live-action shoot, and the director guy "filming" Mickey at the start might be the worst offender of that.
27:24-27:29 - Actually, the Mickey shorts by Paul Rudish weren't the first modern Mickey productions to do that. While it was mostly true that Disney treated Mickey as a corporate symbol whom they wouldn't allow to be anything but nice, there were occasional productions that gave Mickey the personality he had in his 1930s cartoon heyday. Such productions include The Prince and the Pauper (1990), Runaway Brain (1995) & Mickey Mouse Works (1999-2000). In 2009, Disney announced they would put more emphasis on Mickey's more heroic & mischievous sides, but that started with the Epic Mickey video games. (Anyone remember those?) Also, history shows that Disney's Oliver & Company made more money than The Land Before Time, both domestically and worldwide. Still, great work Doggans. I remember seeing this special once on RU-vid and I liked it when I first saw it, but looking at the special through this video, I don't know if I dislike it or find it ironically enjoyable. Still, I find it baffling that people in this special consider Donald Duck an enemy of Mickey when they've been friends for years. (I know they were occasionally rivals in the classic cartoons, but still...)
(Sorry, didn't see this comment until now.) I certainly didn't mean to imply that the Rudish cartoons were the FIRST modern Mickey productions to give Mickey a personality. After all, the very first episode of Obsession of the Moment was about Get A Horse. The Rudish cartoons have just been the series that most CONSISTENTLY gives Mickey a personality.
Technically, there was also Mickey Mouse Works & House of Mouse, as the former show had Mickey being both a mischief-maker and a hero and the latter show combined those elements with his mascot side. But I could be wrong.
You know I recently just watched the Disney Plus documentary 'Mickey: The Story of a Mouse'... and that was a WAY better way of celebrating Mickey Mouse than this.
The constant push to extend copyright law and keep things out of the public domain despite building their success off of adapting public domain stories is the big one. There are probably a few others, but most are on par with the rest of the evil megacorps.
Imagine how this would have gone if Disney had the rights to Oswald when they made this special. They could talk about their own problems and drink their sorrows away like brothers together!
27:48 - 28:43 I think the only other corporation that shares its name with "brands we like" would be Fox. Sure we know 20th Century Fox as the studio that makes a lot of movies and a network filled with adult sitcoms, animated or otherwise. But it also shares its name with an infamous far right wing news corporation. Although, now that Disney owns 20th Century Fox and removed the "Fox" in the studio's name I guess it doesn't count anymore. Always a bigger fish.
I agree that Mickey didn’t really have much of a personality outside of being the ever smiling mascot of a mega corporation that is Disney. It’s even brought up in a animated Saturday Night Live segment where Mickey takes a little girl and boy to the Disney Vault, unintentionally them some of the stuff that Disney doesn’t want the general public to see. After seeing a segment of Song of the South, Mickey says “Well, take good with the bad. He [Disney] created me. Think of all the laughs I’ve given you.” where the little girl replies “You’re supposed to be funny?”
