EEK! a MOUSE!!

Mickey Mouse on Broadway

*This story—now edited and updated—first appeared in the on-line Literature and Memoir salon: Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood…

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…The other day, I’m walking on Broadway and I pass by one of those open wounds you increasingly see developing my part of the city; the sad, sad scene of a boarded-up store front, a couple of hopeless homeless men passed out on the sidewalk, and a tipped over city trash basket, its reeking contents spilled all over the place. And I remembered: This burgeoning mini-slum used to be a busy candy-soda-newspaper store. I remember it so well because, back before Covid, this is where Mickey Mouse hung out…
Not the actual Mickey—he’s either passed on to the rodent afterlife or is living in a fancy retirement resort on a golf course in Nevada, playing golf with Bob Hope, who’s also about a hundred-and-fifty years old… No, the version of Mickey I’m talking about here was a very large metal and plastic mouse in his incarnation as a mini-carousel ride for little kids. This Mickey was chained to a security gate in front of the candy store. He was red, yellow and white, about three feet high and about two feet wide, with large, demented eyes.

I used to like watching children ride on this Mickey, but even when there were no riders I would sometimes stop and stare at him. To me he seemed to have come from outer space or maybe another dimension. The little kids whose parents dropped a quarter in the slot were too little and too young to have any history with Mickey so they couldn’t have registered a specific cultural reaction to him. The excitement they obviously felt had nothing to do with the fact that it was the famous Mickey Mouse they were riding; it could have been Ozzie Ostrich or Katy Kangaroo. What supplied the thrill was simply climbing up onto a giant fairy-tale-like creature and being bounced around for a couple of minutes while some nursery-rhyme tune played.
It was the very same charge a kid (the kid in all of us) gets from riding a horse in a carousel. For anybody even approaching adulthood, a carousel is nothing less than a time-machine. Each time you go around, years drop away—and finally, you’re a kid again…

Back to the rodent on Broadway…
My experience with little kids (including, once-upon-a-time, my own)—is that they generally recoil from anything that is just plain wrong—like, for instance, this nutty steroidal mouse. But, oddly, with this carousel Mickey, the kids I saw had absolutely no negative reaction; they held on to his ears and giggled with pleasure.
Well, they might have loved it, but this manic Mickey stimulated a profound sense of un/dis-ease in me. It was a definite neurotransmitter jolt to be walking down Broadway and experience what was almost a full-blown hallucination. In the city, it was enough to see the occasional live rat scurrying along the curb but a rodent this size and color? It no doubt reawakened some long-suppressed memory of a crazy freak-out from the Sixties or Seventies…
And with no intention of being xenophobic, another thing about this Broadway version of Mickey is that it was ten-to-one he was made in China or South Korea, because the nursery-rhyme song playing when you dropped your quarter in the slot—Old MacDonald—was sung by heavily accented Korean or Chinese children (either that or adults who had inhaled laughing gas).

I always experience a clutch of cognitive dissonance when I see some famous, quintessentially American patriotic or cultural symbol (like a gigantic American flag at a football game) and I know that it was manufactured in a country (like China) that is supposed to be our deadly enemy… Deadly enemies? Really? Says who? Why, I ask, in all seriousness, can’t we just all GET ALONG? Kids are the same everywhere. To a kid, American or Chinese, a tariff would be incomprehensible..

Back to my story…
Purely for purposes of entertainment and pleasing little kids (and what could be more important?) it doesn’t really matter, of course, but still I wondered if the people who recorded this song in a sound-proof studio in Seoul or Beijing had any idea who old MacDonald was? When I was a kid growing up in the city, singing Old MacDonald in the school yard, I had no idea who Old MacDonald was (or, for that matter, even what a farm was). They, the kids/adults who recorded this heavily accented version of Old MacDonald could just as easily be singing Old MacDonald had a sneaker factory or Old MacDonald had a hedge fund…
More than just the meaning of words gets lost in translation—whole ocean-liners of cultural significance founder and sink beneath the waves.

BUT— on the other hand,—so what if there was a pronounced cultural gap? Wasn’t there something—and this may be way too intellectualized—about this pay-to-play manifestation of Mickey that, in fact, joined disparate cultures and even transcended language, if only on a purely subconscious level. Because, obviously, this giant, multicolored mouse was the direct, collective unconcious descendant of cave paintings or ancient clay statues and wooden totems; he was a materialized symbol of a demi-god…
All cultures have their particular “pagan” spirit representatives; Native Americans had Raven and Coyote, Mesopotamians had their half-man, half-fish, and half-lion gods, Hindus had their elephant god and the Egyptians and Greeks had their sphinxes. Likewise, the Chinese and Koreans have rich, ancient traditions of imps, demons, spirit gods and goddesses masquerading in animal form—and, following right along in this ancient lineage of anthropomorphic deities, Americans have Porky Pig and Mickey Mouse.

Just because I always found Mickey Mouse revolting and scary doesn’t mean that he hasn’t got some enduring universal appeal to children; something that just tickles them in their innocent children’s hearts. But whatever that tickle is, I never experienced it. I never could stand him. I didn’t find him funny or uplifting when I was kid and I had no change of heart or mind as I grew older… To me there was something, particularly in his carnival-ride incarnation on Broadway, hysterical about him, if not actually psychotic. He gives me the creepy sensation that there’s a killer dwarf trapped inside him who could leap out at any second and go for my throat.
Also, and this could easily be a left-over from my old-fashioned Nineteen-Fifties upbringing, when Mickey spoke in that squeaky, high-pitched voice of his, he seemed unmanly to me. I know, I know, he was only a cartoon—and maybe I was influenced by the old saying: “Are you a man or a mouse?” But still, here we had an obvious mouse, but dressed—at least partially—as a man; and, he had a girlfriend, Minnie (or was she his lawful wedded wife?). Finally, if he was a rodent, where was his tail?!
Maybe, after all the gender-and-species dysphoria, Mickey was nothing more than a mouse trapped in a mouse’s body, a creature to be pitied, not criticized…

Well, Obviously, by now, I’ve made it—as politicians say—crystal clear that I didn’t/don’t like this rodent. But—yes, you guessed it—there’s more to it… |
As an urban ethnic type, brought up by verbal, ironic Jews from the inner city—and, also, having a lot of Italian friends who were the epitome of cool, I just didn’t get Mickey. Daffy Duck I could dig, likewise Bugs Bunny. They were fast-talking wise-guys, perverse and loony in a way that seemed very familiar to me. |
To me, Mickey Mouse was a boring straight arrow without any apparent sense of humor. He was just the kind of teacher-pleasing nerd that got his ass kicked in the playground. And another thing, I don’t mind telling you that I did not like him cozying up to Annette Funicello on The Mickey Mouse Club TV show.
When I was watching the Mouse Club back in the Fifties, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling for Annette, but I knew I didn’t like this little rat getting anywhere near her.

But, in the end… what if I was repelled by MM, especially in his Broadway ride incarnation? Little kids—thank Disney—didn’t know and couldn’t care less about all the things that drive me to distraction and regular doses of heavy medication. They simply loved that rocking-horse ride and it’s sing-songy music; it doesn’t make any difference to them if they were riding Mickey Mouse or Attila the Hun. Right there-right on Broadway, you had a perfect example of the purity and innocence of childhood versus the spinning ambivalence and unfathomable complexities of a “grown-up.”

Long after I’ve shuffled off this Freudian coil, Old MacDonald will still have his farm and some version of Mickey Mouse will be making little kids giggle. So, even though the thought of it makes me want to retch, let’s all sing the song and join the jamboree, M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!!