Somewhere in the universe, John Foster is roaring

Fan and film collector Kyle Ashby called attention to this howler in Life‘s Mickey at 90 special, now on newsstands everywhere.  The caption for the two photos reads: “After Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse went on to star in some 120 animated shorts, with Walt providing his voice until 1946. At left, an animator works on cels for a film. In addition to character voices, the film soundtracks included music captured in studio, shown here.”

Anyone with eyes can tell you that the photos depict not a cartoon with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, but Toy Time, a 1932 Aesop’s Fable from Van Beuren with Disney mice lookalikes. Because the resemblance was so strong, and because they appeared so often (and often bawdily), Walt Disney actually took Van Beuren to court to get the studio to cease and desist. The photos were part of a staged behind-the-scenes look at the New York studio done after the lawsuit, David Gerstein tells me. “The unspoken point being to show that the characters were now unclothed and looked less like Mickey than before,” he adds.

It’s embarrassing that what’s ostensibly an officially sanctioned puff magazine got something so horribly wrong—as if people like David and J.B. Kaufman, authors of a forthcoming $200 hardback history of Mickey Mouse (talk about a hard sale!) weren’t a message away to check something—but it’s just another example of the unnerving culture we live in, where it’s “cool” to not fact-check anything, and even cooler to promote that ignorance. Witness Jeff Ryan’s recent book A Mouse Divided: How Ub Iwerks Became Forgotten, and Walt Disney Became Uncle Walt, a piece of shit that will undoubtedly further cement further misinformation about Disney’s early history. (No link from me to Ryan’s book. Go find it yourself.)

The Gerstein-Kaufman Mickey book, to be published by Taschen, will be thoroughly accurate and uncover reams of new information, but it’ll also undoubtedly be hindered by the high price, so few beyond diehards will read it compared to the “woke” people reading Ryan’s or Life. This is why a lot of us “whiners” and “snobs” do what we do for animation history. If we don’t get it right, no one else will.