Trivia / Mickey Mouse

• Banned in China:
  • The short "The Barnyard Battle" (1929) was banned in Germany in 1930 for depicting enemy cats with German World War I helmets. In 1931, the short was finally distributed, but with all scenes of enemy combat cut, making it an extra-short three-minute cartoon.
  • Another short "The Mad Doctor" (1933) was banned in England, believed to be too scary for children, yet made its way into two video games, Mickey Mania and Epic Mickey, both of which had a release in England.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Mickey was and still is a merchandising powerhouse all the way to this very day. The Mickey Mouse & Friends franchise is the second-highest grossing franchise of all time, behind only Pokémon.
• Creator Backlash: According to The Illusion of Life, apprentice animator and director Wilfred Jackson was so ashamed of his first directorial effort "The Castaway" that he vowed never to make another film that didn't feel like a Disney picture again.
• Creator's Favorite: Walt clearly loved Mickey like a son and wanted the rest of the world to love him the same, hence why he put him front and center of the Disney company whilst being a huge Control Freak about what could and couldn't be done with him. As a result, Mickey's name became pejorative slang in some parts for basic and underwhelming. Amusingly even Walt himself became aware how much he had limited Mickey:
  Walt Disney: "Mickey's our problem child," ... "He's so much of an institution that we're limited in what we can do with him."
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In Japan, Mickey used to be voiced invariably by women, including Masumi Goto, Ikue Sakakibara and Eiko Yamada. This has been (mostly) averted in since the 1990s, however, with Mickey now voiced by men. Mickey was voiced by Takashi Aoyagi from 1991 to 2019, after which Takanori Hoshino took over. Aya Hirano also dubbed Mickey in some of the newest dubs of the very old public domain shorts, especially the ones who weren't shown in Japan before and during World War II.
• Descended Creator: Walt Disney himself was the initial voice of Mickey, at least until the 40s and 50s.
• Executive Meddling: Disney is extremely overprotective over their mascot and regularly vetoes attempts to feature him in films or television programs because they’re afraid of his reputation being ruined if he is in a bad show or movie. Infamously, Bonkers was not allowed to physically show Mickey when he guest starred in the episode "You Oughta Be In Pictures" so the show chose to hide him in a pet carrier as a Take That! to the policy. Likewise, the showrunners for the 2017 DuckTales reboot wanted to include Mickey as a recurring character, but Disney forbade them from featuring or even mentioning the Mouse in the show. They got around this by having a watermelon as a Companion Cube to Donald that used Chris Diamantopoulos as his voice.
• Fake American:
  • Mickey's second voice actor James MacDonald was born in Scotland but moved to America at the tender age of six months.
  • In the Mickey Mouse (2013) series, Mickey is voiced by Canadian-born Chris Diamantopoulos.
• Fountain of Expies: Mickey had numerous ripoffs back in the 1930s—among them are Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, Foxy Fox, Piggy and Buddy of Warner Bros., and the Columbia Cartoons interpretation of Krazy Kat.
• One-Book Author: With the exception of Chris Diamantopoulos, Mickey Mouse has always been voiced by non-professional voice actors, making him the only consistent role for most of them. Walt Disney was his creator, Wayne Allwine was a sound effects artist trained under Jimmy MacDonald who did manage to avert this, and Bret Iwan is a former Hallmark Cards illustrator. Takashi Aoyagi, Mickey's Japanese voice actor from 1991-2018, is a scholar of Japanese literature who hasn't voiced a single other character in any other medium.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Mickey was voiced by Walt Disney from his debut through Fun and Fancy Free, after which James MacDonald took the reins. During Walt's run as Mickey's voice, Clarence Nash (the voice of Donald) substituted for Mickey's voice for the 1934 short The Dognapper (as well as a few 1950s commercials by Tom Oreb) and Carl Stalling voiced Mickey in 1929's The Carnival Kid. Wayne Allwine took over the role in 1977 and would voice him until his death in 2009. Since then, Mickey has been (and currently is) voiced by Bret Iwan.
  • Quinton Flynn temporarily voiced Mickey in a few early Mickey MouseWorks segments when Allwine was unavailable.
  • Chris Diamantopoulos voiced the character for the Paul Rudish series of shorts, because Disney wanted the Mickey in this series to sound as close as possible to the original Walt Disney. Diamantopoulos also voiced Mickey for Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway — which is based on the Rudish shorts — and Once Upon a Studio.
• Playing Against Type: In the Japanese dub, Takanori Hoshino, Mickey's voice actor since 2018, is very outside of his normal modus operandi on voicing either anti-heroes, jerks or stoic characters, like Van or Iori Yagami.
• Real-Life Relative: All over the place in the Latin American Spanish dub.
  • Edmundo Santos, Mickey and Goofy's first voice, and Francisco Colmenero, Mickey and Goofy's second voice, and Pluto and Pete's longtime voice, were brothers-in-law, and Diana Santos, Minnie's longtime voice and Daisy's second voice, is Santos' daughter and Colmenero's niece. José Manuel Rosano, Pete's first voice, was also brother-in-law to Colmenero.
  • Arturo Mercado Jr., Mickey's current voice, is the son of Arturo Mercado, who voices Scrooge McDuck.
  • Mario Filio, Goofy's current voice, and Ruy Cuevas, Donald's third voice, are first cousins.
• What Could Have Been: Before settling with "Mickey", Walt Disney considered naming him "Mortimer", which his wife Lillian thought was too formal a name. A different mouse named Mortimer would later appear as a rival of sorts for Mickey as a Development Gag.

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