The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (11 page)

Initially, Walt Disney tried to be excited about the show. He wrote in a 1938 issue of
Radio Log
magazine:

I’m letting Mickey and the rest of my gang go on the air, although I’ve been advised against it. We consider this a good omen, for we were also strongly advised against ever creating Mickey, doing our pictures in sound, branching into Technicolor, and creating a feature length picture.

Despite this optimistic statement, Walt had deep concerns that the success of his cartoon characters depended primarily on their visual antics and not their distinctive voices. He once joked that part of Donald Duck’s popularity in foreign countries was that no one could understand what he said and so had to use their own imagination based on the Duck’s body language and tone of voice.

Walt continued:

Many sponsors have whispered the siren song of [radio’s] riches in our ear. Several tried, but none of them had the feeling for our characters. Then we realized that what we had begun to suspect was true: if Mickey went on the air we’d have to build the program ourselves.

But Walt was distracted by the release of
Snow White
and by other issues at the Studio. He took the chance on radio because he hoped it might be a good way to advertise his films and might spark the creation of new characters or new ideas. He said:

It’s a rather logical direction in which we can expand. We expect to develop new ideas and personalities we can use in our pictures. We look upon radio as a new stimulus, a challenge ��� something which will give us fresh ideas and a better perspective on our work.

No new significant characters were created from the venture, but his foray into radio gave Walt insight on how later to handle his entry into television.

When Pepsodent’s contract ended after thirteen weeks, the company signed a renewal to cover the remaining seven weeks of the season, but after that
The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air
quietly disappeared, as did so many other radio shows that didn’t capture the imagination of their audiences.

Walt had been proven right. Even before the show premiered, he had said

I don’t think this show will work. You have to see the characters to fully appreciate them.

Contemporary critics agreed. Aaron Stein of the
New York Post
wrote:

All the strength, the vigor and logic of the Disney films lies in the pictures. The voices, the music and the sounds are usually funny and effective, but they register only as sound effects which point up the pictures. On the air they offered only disembodied sound effects.

In the final episode, which aired on May 15, 1936, Mickey and the gang save Old MacDonald’s farm. With the tune “Heigh Ho” playing in the background, the announcer said:

And so with Mickey and the Gang headed for Vacation Land we bring to a close the last program in the present series. This program has come to you from the Disney Little Theatre on the RKO lot.

Walt, distracted by
Snow White
, had never been able to devote his storytelling skill and his famous attention to detail and innovation to the show, which remains an interesting if little-known footnote in the history of Disney and Mickey Mouse.

Here is the list of all twenty episodes of
The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air
:

• January 2, 1938: “Robin Hood”
  
• January 9, 1938: “Snow White Day”
  
• January 16, 1938: “Donald Duck’s Band”
  
• January 23, 1938: “The River Boat”
  
• January 30, 1938: “Ali Baba”
  
• February 6, 1938: “South of the Border”
  
• February 13, 1938: “Mother Goose and Old King Cole”
  
• February 20, 1938: “The Gypsy Band”
  
• February 27, 1938: “Cinderella”
  
• March 6, 1938: “King Neptune”
  
• March 13, 1938: “The Pied Piper”
  
• March 20, 1938: “Sleeping Beauty”
  
• March 27, 1938: “Ancient China” (Snow White guest appearance!)
  
• April 3, 1938: “Mother Goose and the Old Woman in a Shoe”
  
• April 10, 1938: “Long John Silver”
  
• April 17, 1938: “King Arthur”
  
• April 24, 1938: “Who Killed Cock Robin?”
  
• May 1, 1938: “Cowboy Show”
  
• May 8, 1938: “William Tell”
  
• May 15, 1938: “Old MacDonald”
  

In the early 1980s, it was estimated that on an average day in the United States alone, more than five million items in the shape of Mickey Mouse or with Mickey’s smiling face on them were sold to eager Mouseketeers.

The flood of Mickey Mouse merchandise began a year after Mickey’s birth.

In fall 1929, Walt Disney was in New York to meet with his film distributor, Pat Powers, and to handle some business matters. Walt stated:

I made the first commercial [merchandising] deal. I was in New York and a fellow kept hanging around my hotel waving $300 at me and saying that he wanted to put the Mouse on the paper tablets children use in school. As usual, Roy and I needed money, so I took the $300.

It was so unimportant to Walt that he neither wrote down the name of this person nor the company. By 1975, no example of such a product had surfaced, so it was assumed the story was another Walt embellishment, even though in 1971 Roy O. Disney verified the date, the amount of money, and the item, but could recall nothing else about it.

Enthusiastic searching by Disney memorabilia collectors finally unearthed the tablet. The black, white, and red cover features Mickey Mouse sitting at his school desk holding a red apple in his left hand for the teacher and a history book propped open on his desk. The back cover is plain cardboard. The 5.5 x 8.75 inch tablet includes the copyright “1930 — Walter E. Disney”.

Another school tablet of similar vintage from the same company and in the same format, but not bearing a copyright, has also been discovered. The cover of this tablet features a smiling Mickey facing left and hunched over as he roller skates to school. In his right hand he clutches a strap attached to two school books flying in the air behind him.

These pie-eyed Mickeys are remarkably well-drawn and “on model”, especially compared with other Mickey items released during the same time period.

Disney historians now assume that the person who paid for this first piece of Disney merchandise was Pat Powers (a different Pat Powers from the one who distributed Disney’s films) of Powers Paper Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. While no documentation exists, Powers continued as a licensee from 1931 to 1940, and the 1930 school tablet was very similar to later Powers Paper products.

More offers to merchandise Mickey Mouse quickly followed.

In January 1930, Carolyn “Charlotte” Clark, who had been making her livelihood selling cookies and novelties during the Great Depression, came up with an idea of how to use her talents as a seamstress to earn extra money.

She sent her fourteen-year-old nephew, Bob Clampett, who later would become a legendary Warner Bros. cartoon director and the creator of
Beany and Cecil
, to the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. Clampett sat through three consecutive showings in order to see a Mickey Mouse short several times so he could sketch the character. There were no illustrations of Mickey Mouse available at that time other than on movie posters.

From those sketches, Clark made the first stuffed Mickey Mouse doll. Clampett’s father advised her to get Walt Disney’s permission before she started selling them. He drove her to the Disney Studio. Both Walt and Roy loved the doll. They rented a house near their Hyperion Studio, later nicknamed the Doll House, where Clark worked on making the doll in three different sizes.

Bob Clampett earned thirty cents per doll stuffing each one with kapok and brushing off the excess. Clampett’s father became the head salesman.

At first, the dolls were purchased by Walt and Roy to give to friends, business acquaintances, and special visitors to the studio. Clampett recalled:

Walt Disney himself sometimes came over in an old car to pick up the dolls. One time, his car loaded with Mickeys wouldn’t start, and I pushed while Walt steered until it caught and he took off.

In 1930, after a photo of Walt with one of the dolls appeared in
Screen Play Secrets
magazine and in several newspapers, the demand from the general public became overwhelming. Stores were swamped with calls from customers wanting a doll just like the one they saw in the photos.

By November 1930, Clark was producing 300-400 dolls per week for sale at two large Los Angeles area department stores, May Company and Bullock’s, for five dollars each. The department stores only paid two dollars and fifty cents per doll, and so made an amazing profit. Clark had to employ six full-time seamstresses to meet demand.

Roy O. Disney wrote in 1931:

The doll we are having manufactured [by Clark] is, as many buyers have stated, the truest character doll of its kind that they have ever seen. You must realize that this means far more to [Walt and me] than the mere royalties involved in the sale of the doll.

When demand continued to exceed what the overworked staff could make, the Disney brothers decided to release the Charlotte Clark doll pattern to the general public and let people make their own dolls. They were not concerned about the profit from the dolls being sold but rather with satisfying public demand for the dolls. Some families simply could not afford the price of the doll in those hard times, and Walt felt that every child who wanted a Mickey Mouse doll should have one.

The McCall Company of New York released Printed Pattern No. 91 in early 1932 with twenty seven pieces, one transfer, and one tissue sheet of directions at a cost of thirty-five cents. The pattern was printed in English, French, and Spanish, and it was sold from 1932 through 1939 in the United States and Europe. Although the pattern came with the warning that it was sold “for individual use only and not to be used for manufacturing purposes”, many out-of-work seamstresses during the Great Depression earned a nice living making and selling the dolls in quantity for a monetary “donation”.

In 1934, Knickerbocker Toy Company in New York started producing Mickey and Minnie dolls based on Clark’s patterns. Clark designed other dolls for the company, and when Gund Manufacturing took over the production of the dolls after World War II, Clark designed their Disney dolls until 1958. She passed away on December 31, 1960, at the age of 76.

In early 1929, Disney Legend Les Clark drew several poses for Mickey Mouse. This model sheet, however, was used only for merchandising and publicity artwork. It had fifteen images of Mickey and two of Minnie penciled by Clark and inked by Win Smith, who inked the Mickey Mouse comic strip.

It was Clark who drew the famous pose of Mickey standing with legs apart, one hand on his hip and the other high in the air that was used on countless movie posters, house ads, and other products. He did two versions of the same pose, one as a classic “clear line” image, executed in graphite pencil on two-hole animation paper, and the other superimposed within a scaled-off grid. This grid would then be used by other artists to help recreate the pose in exact proportion at a larger or smaller size, a common practice at the time.

Both of these historical originals from Clark’s personal estate were offered for sale at Hake’s Auctions in 2009.

The first merchandising contract signed by Roy O. Disney (who was in charge of the business end of the Disney Studio) was with George Borgfeldt & Company in 1930.

The deal allowed the New York-based Borgfeldt to manufacture and sell “figures and toys of various materials, embodying your design of comic Mice known as Minnie and Mickey Mouse, appearing in copyrighted motion pictures.” The first item released was a box of Mickey and Minnie Mouse children’s handkerchiefs decorated with the pair doing some domestic chores.

Borgfeldt made its first Disney-themed toy in 1930: a wooden Mickey Mouse with jointed hands, arms, legs, and a tail. It came in two sizes (seven-and-a-half inches and nine-and-a-quarter inches) and had a painted composition head and a tail made of cloth-covered electrical wire. Heavy-duty elastic held the doll together, with the head being connected by a metal hook. Everything moved, including the head, hands, arms, and legs, and the doll was designed to be able to sit or stand. Each doll was hand-painted: Mickey’s shorts were colored either red, yellow, or green, with matching shoes.

Mickey Mouse animator and director Burton Gillett made the original sketch for the wooden toy. In the sketch, Mickey was depicted as facing forward and from a side view.

Disney received a 2.5% royalty for products selling for fifty cents or less, and 5% for items costing more.

The Disney Brothers considered merchandise primarily as a means to publicize the characters outside the movie theaters and to secure intellectual property protection across various avenues other than the films themselves.

Roy O. Disney famously said in October 1929:

We are a movie studio, not a toy store. We have no desire to go into the business of manufacturing or distributing toys and novelties, but we greatly desire to take advantage of the wonderful opportunity that exists.

Borgfeldt also produced comic character toys for the King Features newspaper syndicate. When King Features contacted Walt about producing a syndicated comic strip featuring Mickey Mouse, they also recommended that Disney use Borgfeldt as their toy manufacturer.

Unfortunately, Borgfeldt was known for making cheap novelties for five-and-dime stores, using inexpensive overseas manufacturing facilities, and had no concern for quality.

In 1931, Borgfeldt flooded stores with such branded Mickey Mouse items as a drum, a metal drummer, a sparkler, crickets, a wooden squeak toy, a wooden dancer, a walking toy on a board, express wagon, a wooden-jointed Mickey Mouse, a tumbling circus toy, a ring nose puzzle, a rubber sport ball, four velvet dolls, a wooden bobbing head figure, a shooting game, a quoits game, and two stencil sets.