90 years ago Mickey Mouse became very popular due to his freewheeling attitude in the early cartoons. After a couple decades Mickey Mouse was tamed as he became the 1950s company image, and his popularity declined. Five years ago his early character was revived with a new series of shorts.
You may have heard of these shorts, which began in 2013 with “Croissant De Triomphe”. In the short, set in Paris (and with only French dialogue), Mickey is tasked by his sweetheart Minnie to retrieve and deliver a lot of croissants to the impatient customers at her cafe. But, of course, it’s not as simple as that; the short consists of the various obstacles that get in Mickey’s way as he takes his scooter through Paris to help Minnie out. All eventually is made right, but not before Mickey has gone on a wild chase through the city, even passing through a castle with Cinderella and Prince Charming (where he accidentally breaks the famous glass slipper).
Josh Spiegel, at /Film, has some praise for the new shorts.
It’s been surprisingly encouraging to see the Walt Disney Company turn back to its past and not do so in a destructive manner. There are so many ways in which a revival of the Mickey Mouse shorts could have been a huge failure; they could have leaned harder on juvenile humor, or on faux-hip pop-culture references. Instead, while the new shorts do acknowledge and reference the history of Mickey Mouse as a character and the Disney studio as a whole, they’re full of sparkling wit, fast-paced gags, and everything that made Mickey Mouse so special in 1928.
Most are available on Disney XD and YouTube.
Here is their new 2018 Mickey Mouse birthday “Surprise” short.
And Mickey, as his travels prove, remains popular worldwide.