Ninety Years From IP to Meme: What Has Disney's Mickey Come to Mean?

The American spirit, capitalism, rebellion without a cause — almost everything in contemporary society leaves some trace on Mickey Mouse.

Mickey — the mouse Chinese audiences know better as Mi Laoshu, "Mickey Mouse" — has turned 90. Black-furred, in red shorts, yellow boots and white gloves, he is recognizable anywhere in the world; strip away every detail and the silhouette alone still gives him away. But do you remember what he was actually like on screen?

In the 1980s, CCTV aired Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and it was a sensation. Today all you can find on Youku, Tencent Video or iQiyi is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and that is a show for toddlers. For roughly 30 years Chinese audiences saw no Mickey at all. What kind of mouse is he — brave or cowardly? What adventures has he been on? Has he ever saved the world? Even a diehard fan would struggle to sum up his character in a few words.

This is the strange position Mickey — and most of Disney's classic characters — occupies in China: a blurred face, and universal fame. He hasn't even skipped a generation, because merchandise printed with Mickey and his girlfriend Minnie keeps selling.

This mouse embodies Disney's oldest and most durable ambition, but he means far more than that. He is Disney's most important IP, and once he became a cultural symbol, what he stands for stopped being entirely Disney's to control. Disney's caution has kept Mickey from acquiring much beyond his original personality — which does not mean he has gone unchallenged.

Mickey is a perfect specimen of the journey from IP to meme.

Mickey is an American mouse, and the world has never seen him as merely a mouse — it sees a piece of America. Iran banned Mickey cartoons in 2014; the French protested the opening of Disneyland Paris in 1992; East Germany banned Mickey comics in 1954; and as far back as 1929, the earliest Mickey shorts could not be screened in Germany. Mickey became something governments were eager to control.

In 1997, because Disney backed a film directed by Martin Scorsese, television programming that included Dragon Club (《小神龙俱乐部》) disappeared overnight from Chinese screens. The New York Times quoted Michael Eisner, then Disney's CEO: "Overnight, all our business in China just stopped."

That said, Mickey's creator, Walt Disney, never treated him as an apolitical cartoon living in a world of its own. Disney was a patriot, and he had no qualms about sending Mickey out to cheer for his country.

A year after Pearl Harbor, the United States announced it was entering World War II, and the fighting spread further. With the outcome still unclear, the U.S. Navy came to Walt Disney in 1942, hoping he would make animated shorts teaching naval cruising strategy. The Army, the Air Force and the Department of Agriculture followed with similar requests. The demands from these government departments went far beyond Disney's usual output, but Walt Disney agreed anyway, and spent the next three years working for the U.S. government.

Donald Duck starred in many of these shorts — sometimes doing a clumsy Hitler impression as the butt of the joke, sometimes playing the hero and smashing an apple into Hitler's face. Mickey, Donald's good friend, appeared rarely in the films themselves, but he still turned up as an emblem on the propaganda posters.

In the images below, Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Pluto walk to the supermarket together, answering the U.S. government's call to drive less. A line of text sits right in the middle: "For your country's sake — care for your car." In another poster, Mickey wears a pilot's uniform and gives a thumbs up. The words "You buy 'em, we'll fly 'em" urged Americans to buy war bonds; that money went to the military and paid for the American war effort.

In November 1942, Time magazine ran a two-page cartoon spread. Under the title "The Disney Studio Goes to War," it showed 36 Disney characters enlisted across the different branches of the U.S. military, with Mickey — in uniform, rifle on his shoulder — directly above the headline. Mickey was assigned to the Junior Victory Army, a body of children and women who gathered supplies at home to support the troops at the front.

"Because Mickey and his friends were used to promote civic duty and wartime loyalty so vigorously, they quickly became symbols of the nation, alongside the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam," wrote Bethanee Bemis, a researcher at the National Museum of American History who specializes in American political history.

Walt Disney would probably have been pleased with that. In fact, even without the war, he had set out to capture the American spirit when he created Mickey.

In Mickey's first animated short, Plane Crazy (1928), Walt Disney had him imitate Charles Lindbergh and fly off on an adventure. Lindbergh was a hero in American eyes at the time: in 1927 he flew from New York to Paris, the first person in history to cross the Atlantic alone and without stopping. Disney had given Mickey a short temper, but the film still shows his intent to salute a hero.

Because that first personality wasn't likable, Plane Crazy failed. Walt Disney soon followed it with Steamboat Willie. It was the first Mickey film to get a public release, and in it Disney again paid tribute to a classic silent film from the same year, Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Keaton is considered a master of silent comedy on a par with Charlie Chaplin. Steamboat Bill, Jr. isn't his best work, but it still caught the fearless optimism of the American boom of the 1920s. To match that spirit, Walt Disney turned Mickey into a warmer, more charismatic character. That, plus his own innovations in animation technique, won Steamboat Willie a reception from American audiences more enthusiastic than anyone expected.

The good times didn't last. America's economic bubble burst, the Great Depression arrived in October 1929, unemployment and bankruptcy spread across the country, and panic settled over everyone. It was then that Mickey became a way for Americans to find comfort and encouragement. Like the lipstick effect: for very little money you could buy an hour or two of escape at the cinema. And Mickey, revised by Walt Disney, had become a more conventional American hero.

"He [Mickey] finds jobs for the unemployed, he props up the operations of bankrupt companies. Wherever Mickey scurries, in America or abroad, the sun of prosperity breaks through the clouds," The New York Times wrote in praise of him in 1935. "Everyone can find a trace of themselves in Mickey; he is a bridge people can use to reach themselves."

The philosopher Walter Benjamin made a similar point. People saw their own likeness in Mickey, he believed, and that — not the stories themselves — was why Mickey succeeded so enormously.

From then on Mickey was bound tightly to the American spirit, and he spread into other countries alongside Hollywood, which already had global reach. Given the international politics of the period, plenty of countries were hostile to the United States and looked for all sorts of reasons to ban him.

In one Mickey short, his opponents were a group of cats in German military caps. Because the cats were the villains, German censors ruled that the film insulted German national dignity. In 1934 Japan made a short of its own starring Mickey, this time cast as the villain, clashing with figures out of traditional Japanese painting. The subtext needed no explaining: our culture is older, and Mickey is nothing but a stand-in for American imperialism.

Walt Disney himself probably never expected Mickey to go from a character on paper to an indispensable part of American culture so fast.

Just as Mickey became a symbol of America in the 1930s, a commercial plan built around him — and around the enormous audience he had gathered — formally got underway. People are used to seeing Mickey on everything from T-shirts to pencil cases now, but at the time this was a huge innovation in business models.

At a New York hotel in 1929, Walt Disney recalled, a businessman approached him about printing Mickey on children's pencil boxes, and offered $300. Disney had been in business only a short time. "As usual, Roy [Walt Disney's brother] and I needed the money, so I took the $300."

A share of the box office from Mickey's shorts was of course a major income source, but the company Walt Disney ran then was not today's entertainment giant: it had to split revenue with distributors and cinemas, and it had little bargaining power. Selling Mickey's image to product-makers was an extra stream. Walt Disney quickly saw it was good business, and in 1932 he brought in the Jewish businessman Herman Kamen to handle merchandise.

The next year, watches with Mickey's face on them went on sale. On the first day, Macy's in New York sold 11,000 of them, pulling the watchmaker Ingersoll-Waterbury back from the edge of bankruptcy and helping it grow from 300 employees to 3,000. Alan Bryman, a professor at the University of Leicester, estimated that by 1948 Disney's licensing income alone reached $100 million. A 2008 Time report said 40% of Disney's annual licensing revenue came from Mickey.

Roy Disney, the more commercially minded of the two brothers, understood exactly what licensing would do. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "Every doll sold to a family member is a daily advertisement placed in that household, reminding them our cartoons are coming and turning them Mickey Mouse Minded." And so Mickey's image was pushed out at any cost.

For the company this plainly worked. Besides the enormous profits, licensing became a crucial reason Mickey stayed alive as a character. Through the 1960s and '70s, when Disney had little appetite for new Mickey cartoons — a stretch that included Walt Disney's death, weak results and much else — it was Mickey merchandise that kept him inside Americans' childhood memories.

Chinese people are no strangers to this either. In the many years when Disney could not bring its cartoons into China, it was licensed and pirated backpacks, stationery and clothes that introduced most Chinese children to Mickey.

And as he was printed onto more and more products, Mickey picked up a layer of meaning beyond the American spirit. "He looks innocent on the surface, and that conceals the role he actually plays. He turns children's dreams into commodities, and lets the logic of the market seep into every part of children's lives," said Henry Giroux, a professor at Penn State, in a classic Marxist critique of the culture.

A 1995 letter to the editor of The New York Times may explain why people felt frustrated once Mickey became a commodity. "A family of four has to pay $166 to enter the Magic Kingdom, the 'happiest place on earth,'" wrote an economics graduate student at Stanford, the elite private university. "Disney bundles all its products together to maximize profit."

Many people came to see Mickey as a symbol of consumerism. In a sense they were not wrong. Mickey has been a beneficiary of globalization and consumerism, and a force driving them.

This has to do with how Disney itself grew. After World War II the company seized the opening created by the rise of television and the reshuffling of the entertainment industry, and turned from an animation studio into a giant spanning film, television, theme parks, merchandise, games, music and publishing. Disney, which once couldn't even make the "Big Five, Little Three" list of Hollywood's Golden Age, can now get almost anything it wants.

As professional managers took over, a run of CEOs — Michael Eisner, Robert Iger and others — made Disney a company whose main strategy was acquisition. Mickey, its biggest star, became the tool people used to mock it.

In 2012 Disney bought Lucasfilm and restarted the Star Wars films. Some fundamentalist Star Wars fans worried Disney's involvement would change the style of the original — George Lucas did have his own plans for where Star Wars would go next, and Disney threw them out entirely — and so they coined the term "Darth Mickey."

"Darth" is Darth Vader, the great villain of the saga, who slaughtered his way across the galaxy after falling to the dark side of the Force. Mickey's head was grafted onto Vader's body, with a line of stormtroopers behind him. Star Wars: A New Hope was retitled Star Wars: No More Hope.

The same script played out again in 2018, this time over Disney's purchase of 20th Century Fox. In one meme, Deadpool, the Simpsons and Avatar are all swept up in Mickey's white glove. In another, more widely shared, Mickey turns into Thanos and, copying the way Thanos collects the Infinity Stones in the films, sets one entertainment company after another into his gauntlet. Once again Mickey became, inevitably, a symbol of capital and capitalism.

Walt Disney once said the biggest trouble of his life was money, because realizing his dreams took a great deal of it. When he said it, he was thinking about how much making cartoons and building theme parks cost. His first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, cost nearly $1.5 million in 1937 — a fortune to him at the time.

Today, with Disney's parks, films and toys having become children's dreams, the line seems to carry a different meaning.

Online, Mickey has a side Disney's PR department hates to see — and cannot stamp out. Sometimes people mock him because of the acquisitions; sometimes it is closer to rebellion without a cause, with no reason behind it at all, people simply borrowing his face to express a feeling or an opinion.

Take the image below. Mickey and an ordinary mouse appear side by side. Icons above the ordinary mouse's head read "no comments, no likes, no followers"; Mickey has 280 comments, 1,500 likes and 970 followers. The Twitter user @660th, who made it, added a caption: "We live in the same society."

@660th insisted the picture had no deep meaning, that it was just a stupid sarcastic joke. But anyone living in contemporary society understands what lies behind it: good-looking people get the whole world, and ordinary-looking people get nothing. The same joke would have worked with Pikachu and a plain mouse, or Donkey Kong and a chimpanzee. The maker chose Mickey.

A more extreme case might be the image below, where Mickey covers his eyes with two middle fingers and the F-word is followed by three exclamation points. Does it mean anything? Perhaps nothing beyond anger, defiance and cynicism. The picture seems worthless except as a way to vent. And what did Mickey ever do wrong?

This may be the fate of every cartoon character that becomes part of a culture. Pikachu, Mario and Superman have all been given dark or mocking makeovers, and those remakes share a trait: they push the character toward its own opposite. The cute turns frightening, the strong turns weak, and Mickey has gone from optimistic and tough to a sneering shorthand for the sweet and dim.

In Coppola's 1974 film The Godfather Part II, Fredo Corleone, played by John Cazale, explains why he betrayed the Don, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), and roars: "Send Fredo off to do this, send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse nightclub somewhere." Here "Mickey Mouse" is an adjective, meaning roughly unimportant, pointless.

Kubrick used the term the same way 13 years later in Full Metal Jacket. The drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey yells at two soldiers: "What is this Mickey Mouse shit?" The profanity had gone up a level.

Today Urban Dictionary, the American slang compendium, carries dozens of definitions of "Mickey Mouse," most of them derogatory and many of them obscene. The top-voted one: "substandard, poorly executed or organized, amateurish."

As people's expression moved from text to images over the past decade or so, turning Mickey into memes to say the same thing became rampant. In Disney's official telling, Mickey is forever the sunny, adorable star with no equal in the world, but people insist on reinterpreting him through the opposite image. Behind that seems to lie the fierce, extreme emotional expression peculiar to contemporary society, amplified and spread by the internet.

Some serious artists read these strange Mickeys through a more systematic theory. José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros has made a series of works featuring an obese Snow White, a Donald Duck smoking marijuana and a Cinderella giving her stepmother the finger. He calls it a test of how much people will tolerate and accept. "The original presentation of these characters is highly idealized, hinting at a kind of Baroque fantasy. Unlike that fantasy, these images show the darker side of contemporary society, and from them you can see how much tolerance people have for these figures."

Whether the motives are shallow or deep, impulsive or considered, one thing is clear: Mickey's image has escaped the control of both his designer, Walt Disney, and his owner, the Walt Disney Company. Through endless re-creation and circulation, creators and viewers have given Mickey new meaning again and again, pushing him further into contemporary culture.

When Walt Disney formally introduced Mickey to audiences in 1928, he cannot have imagined that Mickey's 90 years would be tied so tightly to the course of world history.

From the Great Depression through World War II, Mickey spoke for the American spirit. After the war he grew up with the baby boomers and secured his place in American childhood memory. The globalization that began at the same time turned him from a piece of America into a globally popular icon. And the commercial success of his owner drew him into the shaping of capitalism and consumer society. You could even say that every side of contemporary society leaves a trace on Mickey.

Mickey is out of control — at least as far as Disney is concerned. If Chinese audiences went a long time without a Mickey cartoon for a particular reason, so, in effect, did the rest of the world. With no new work being made, the social and cultural meanings Mickey kept accumulating gradually overtook the character Walt Disney had written into the 1930s shorts. He became more and more a sign and a symbol, less and less an animated character with feelings and a story.

Because Mickey's meanings had grown so rich, even a small change could reach a long way. For many years Disney would not lightly start a new Mickey project. It worried about ruining him — and the fat commercial profits he brought in.

Not until 2009, at the direction of Disney's chairman and CEO Robert Iger, did a brand-new Mickey plan get going. It started with video games, trying to reshape him by adding a little temper and dishonesty. If that drew younger audiences, it could later extend to television and other media.

Ten years on, Mickey is still a blurred figure. He hasn't become more vivid; he remains a mascot on a pedestal. Disney, for its part, seems too busy with the streaming challenge from Netflix to worry about what kind of mouse Mickey actually is.

The good news is that Mickey can still stand for Disney's brand, and he is still an important source of revenue. As part of this era, he won't go out of fashion as long as the foundations of society hold.

And that is exactly the thing nobody can guarantee.

Cover image from: Disney's new Mickey Mouse animation, and Mickey's 80th anniversary celebration at Disneyland.