‘It’s all in the ears’: John Updike’s paean to Mickey Mouse, 1992
In 1992, John Updike wrote, ‘It’s all in the ears,’ in this paean to the world’s most famous mouse and how he achieved iconic status. Updike, an accomplished cartoonist himself, displays a draughtsman’s precision in this extract from his preface to The Art of Mickey Mouse: Artists Interpret the World’s Favourite Mouse (Hyperion), edited by Craig Yoe and Janet Morra-Yoe.
Mickey was based ‘on the tame fieldmice that used to wander into Disney’s old studio in Kansas City’
Updike grew up with Mickey, knew him before he hit the big time. It was ‘a simple love’; he was ‘one of us, a bridge to the adult world’, and provided milestones. Young Updike won a Mickey Mouse piggy bank ‘in a third-grade spelling bee, my first intellectual triumph’. Enthralled by Walt Disney’s comic strips, he dreamed of becoming an animator for Disney. The ears are a stroke of genius: ‘two solid black circles, no matter the angle at which he holds his head’, bestowing a vital ‘surreal consistency’.
Updike, who wrote for the ordinary midwest American, notes Mickey’s humble ‘genesis legend’, based ‘on the tame fieldmice that used to wander into Disney’s old studio in Kansas City’. Disney and his wife, Lillian, created the murine character in 1927 to take the place of Oswald the Rabbit, Disney’s first successful (floppy-eared) cartoon creation, ‘abandoned when his New York distributor, Charles Mintz, attempted to swindle him’.
Unlike the ears, the eyes undergo a ‘mutation’. The ‘old shiny black pupils’ are replaced, from 1938, with ‘entire oval eyes, containing pupils of their own’. ‘The change brought a cuter Mickey closer to humans… but also took away something of his bug-eyed cartoon readiness for adventure.’ At the time of writing, Mickey lives on in comic strips, and Disney Studios have ‘fitted him with all of a white man’s household comforts and headaches’. But it is as an ‘unencumbered drifter whistling along on the road of hard knocks’ that he ‘lives on in our minds’.
Disney, ‘stung by the studio strike of 1940, moved to the right’, but his mouse remains ‘one of the 30s proletariat’. By the Nineties, in ringmaster gear and outsized head at Disney theme parks, Mickey is ‘in danger of seeming not merely venerable kitsch but part of the great trash problem’. No matter. ‘His goodness shines through.’
