The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (12 page)
Read The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Online
Authors: Jim Korkis
Tags: #Mickey Mouse, #walt disney, #Disney
By the holiday season, Borgfeldt hoped to also release a kite, a marble game, a celluloid rattle, a speed boat, a bubble pipe, an inflated rubber doll, and a magic lantern with Mickey Mouse slides. These toys were all produced under the Nifty Toy Company label.
Roy wrote to Borgfeldt on October 30, 1931:
Walt had the opportunity of seeing the display of all Borgfeldt Mickey Mouse toys and novelties in the Biltmore Hotel. Walt was not disappointed. He was positively disgusted with the majority of the merchandise… Evidently in your opinion this is good merchandise at the price and competition demands that you keep that price down. However, we have built our business on the theory of trying to make a better product than the other fellow, and we still believe we are right.
Early in 1932, Walt Disney received an unexpected long distance call from Herman “Kay” Kamen, a successful and ambitious advertising executive in Kansas City. He expressed his disappointment in the quality of Disney merchandise and wanted to become involved.
Walt was impressed with his ideas and told him that the next time he was in Hollywood to drop by and they could continue the discussion. Within hours, Kamen was on a train to California.
When Kamen arrived, he immediately went to the Disney Studio and met with Walt and Roy, who were impressed with his enthusiasm andcommitment to quality. In a 1968 interview, Roy O. Disney recalled:
Kay walked in our office one day and said, “I don’t know how much business you’re doing but I’ll guarantee you that much business, and give you 50% of everything I do over.” We made a deal with him. He was a merchandising-minded fellow. He did a terrific job for us.
The Disney Company signed a contract with Kamen on July 1, 1932. For the next seventeen years, until he died in a plane crash in 1949, Kay Kamen handled the licensing of Disney merchandise.
He cancelled existing contracts with manufacturers who lacked prestige, raised their prices on products to compensate for the Disney royalties, produced poor quality material, and exhibited no enthusiasm for significantly improving their output.
The Disney-Kamen partnership quickly became one of the most successful collaborations in business history. Within six months, Kamen had doubled retail sales of character merchandise to $6,000,000.
By 1935, over $35,000,000 worth of Disney character merchandise had been sold. One Mickey Mouse book sold over 2.4 million copies. Kamen reported that as of October 1935, he had turned down over a thousand applications for licenses to use Disney characters. The companies he turned down generally produced such items as cigars, cigarettes, alcohol, and medicine.
By the late 1930s, revenue from merchandise exceeded revenue from film rentals.
It was this income that gave Walt Disney the funds for producing
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937) and helped convince Bank of America that the Disney brothers were a good risk to lend money.
From his New York office, Kamen and his group of in-house artists and sales reps successfully marketed Disney’s stable of characters to hundreds of manufacturers whom Kamen visited personally and frequently.
Kamen had the secretaries answer the phone with a school girl inflection saying “Mickey Mouse”. When asked in 1932 by
The New Yorker
magazine why he had them do that, Kamen replied: “Mickey is better known than I am.”
Kamen was responsible for two legendary merchandising landmarks.
Early in 1933, the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company of Connecticut was almost bankrupt. Kamen approved a license for them to make the first wristwatches featuring Mickey Mouse. Kamen helped get the watch featured at Macy’s Department Store in New York City where 11,000 were sold in a single day. After only eight weeks of production, Ingersoll-Waterbury had to add 2,700 employees to its existing 300 to fill the demand for the watches. By June 1935, the company had sold over 2.5 million watches.
On May 7, 1934, the Lionel Corporation went into receivership with liquid assets of only $62,000 and liabilities of $296,000. Kamen believed in the company and so on July 19, 1934, he licensed them to produce a metal wind-up handcar with Mickey and Minnie Mouse at the handles pumping up and down in a see-saw manner. Supposedly, it was inspired by the ending of the Mickey Mouse short
Mickey’s Choo-Choo
(1929) where they did the same thing. The handcar came with eight sections of curved metal track to form a twenty-seven inch circle. It sold for one dollar and advertisements claimed “loaded with fun and a thousand thrills, they circle the track ten or more times at a single winding”.
In four months, 253,000 sets were sold. The $296,000 Lionel owed its creditors was paid in full on December 31, 1934. On January 1, 1935, Lionel had $500,000 in liquid assets. It was not just the sale of the Mickey Mouse handcar but the fact that the company was associated with Mickey Mouse that made the rest of its products and the company itself popular.
In a story picked up around the world, Federal Receivership Judgey L. Fake, who turned a healthy Lionel company back to its owners on January 21, 1935, gave Mickey Mouse the credit for saving the company.
The New York Times
ran this headline on January 22, 1935: “Mickey Mouse Saves Jersey Toy Concern; Carries It Back to Solvency on His Railway”.
A 1934 survey of seventy manufacturers of Disney and Mickey Mouse character merchandise revealed that approximately ten thousand jobs had been created to meet public demand.
In the March 10, 1935, issue of
New York Times Magazine
, L.H. Robbins wrote:
New applause is heard for Mickey Mouse, rising high above the general acclaim for him that already rings throughout the earth.
The fresh cheering is for Mickey the Big Business Man, the world’s super-salesman. He finds work for jobless folk. He lifts corporations out of bankruptcy. Wherever he scampers, here or overseas, the sun of prosperity breaks through the clouds.
Shoppers carry Mickey Mouse satchels and briefcases bursting with Mickey Mouse soap, candy, playing cards, bridge favors, hairbrushes, chinaware, alarm clocks and hot water bottles wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper tied with Mickey Mouse ribbon and paid for out of Mickey Mouse purses with savings hoarded in Mickey Mouse banks.
[Children] wear Mickey Mouse caps, waists, socks, shoes, slippers, garters, mittens, aprons, bibs and underthings, and beneath Mickey Mouse rain capes and umbrellas. They go to school where Mickey Mouse desk outfits turn lessons into pleasure.
They play with Mickey Mouse velocipedes, footballs, baseballs, bounce balls, bats, catching gloves, boxing gloves, doll houses, doll dishes, tops, blocks, drums, puzzles, games.
Paint sets, sewing sets, drawing sets, stamping sets, jack sets, bubble sets, pull toys, push toys, animated toys, tents, camp, stools, sand pails, masks, blackboards and balloons.
Harper’s Magazine
(May 1934) reported that Disney’s “chief income from Mickey Mouse was not from films but rather from by-products”.
In 1988, on Mickey’s 60th birthday, during that year alone, he appeared on over 9,000 products from ice cream treats to 18-karat-gold and diamond brooches ($5,800) in more than fifty countries.
Mickey Mouse merchandise in the 1930s pioneered a business practice that would become standard in Hollywood — that of utilizing a variety of products not only to generate additional income but to support a core franchise.
continue, because if he hasn’t reached a saturation point by now, he never will.
— George Lucas
Film producer and director (1988)
On the following pages are several sections devoted to intriguing facts, quotes, and anecdotes about Mickey Mouse organized in different categories.
McCall’s
magazine, Feb. 1953)
Guinness World Records
honor of the largest documented Mickey Mouse memorabilia collection in the world. Her collection at the time included 2,100 items; in 2013, the collection had grown to 4,127 items, filling her 1,900-square-foot condo.
Esteves estimates her actual collection at nearly 6,000 items, but many of them were packed away and unavailable for the final official count.
New York Times Magazine
in 1947, Kay Kamen, Disney’s licensing agent, said: “Mickey Mouse is the greatest thing in the history of merchandising.”
The boxes featured cut-outs of the Disney characters and were an inexpensive way for children in the Great Depression to have a Mickey Mouse toy after they finished eating their corn flakes.
General Foods paid Disney an annual fee of $1.5 million (over $20 million today) to produce these boxes that cost families roughly 12 cents per box. General Foods continued the contract through 1941.
It was the first licensed cartoon character lunch pail and included an oval pie tray in the oblong container. Disney did not license another lunch box until 1954, when ADCO Liberty produced one with Mickey on one side and Donald on the other.
The designer, Disney Legend Al Konetzni, was an idea man and artist for the Disney Character merchandising division from 1953-1981. Konetzni was also a marketing account executive who coordinated licensing with such industry giants as General Electric (for the Mickey Mouse night light); Lever Brothers (for the Mickey Mouse toothbrush); and Bradley Time and Elgin (for Mickey Mouse watches and clocks, among others).
He was also responsible for the development and licensing of the now-collectible Mickey and Donald Pez candy dispensers. “Mickey lways makes me smile,” said Konetzni in 2003.
The New Yorker
reported: “Mr. Kay Kamen holds the contract with Walt Disney to use Mickey Mouse’s picture on toys, sweat shirts, etc. (When you call up Mr. Kamen, the switchboard girl says, “Mickey Mouse.”) He has 9 artists working for him, and he summons them to his private office by ringing the buzzer once for Artist No. 1, twice for No. 2, etc. The other day he rang for all nine at once. 45 buzzes - hell of a commotion. The artists dropped everything and hurried into Kamen’s sanctum. He waited until they were all lined up at attention, then cleared his throat and said, ‘Gentlemen, Mr. Disney has just sent word that henceforward Mickey’s eyes are not to be highlighted’.”
“The animators were always disappointed with these items because the little toys never looked like the Mickey that we drew. We’d wait until the merchandising manager was out of ear shot and we’d toss all those toy samples he’d leave with us into the wastebasket… toys that I see going in auctions today for as much as a thousand dollars.”
Toy Collector
magazine reported: “Though Donald (Duck) did well in the merchandise marketplace, his success never equaled that of Mickey, who found overwhelming commercial favor. Merchandise seems to have been Mickey’s specialty, and from the beginning Mickey toys, dolls, games and figurines vastly outnumber similar articles featuring Donald.”