A Mickey Mouse Reader by Garry Apgar (review)

Is any image more recognizable than Mickey Mouse? With two circular ears, wide eyes, and a beaming grin, he has transformed throughout the years, yet remains one of the most— perhaps the most—reproduced image of the past century. As such, Walt Disney’s “little fellow trying to do the best he could” has become a signifier of a range of ideas and ideologies: a testament of American ingenuity, a legend of comic art and animation, a mascot of a multimedia empire, a representative of global capitalism, and a beacon for hope and optimism. In his new anthology, A Mickey Mouse Reader, Garry Apgar aims to capture in one volume this rich variety of responses, from the introduction of Mickey to the present, to illustrate the iconicity of this cheerful rodent.

The collection is arranged chronologically into seven periods. The first period, “The Early Years, 1928–1931,” covers the introduction of Mickey in Steamboat Willie (Disney & Iwerks, 1928) and the initial few years of his appearance in film, comics, and consumer culture. Growing esteem among the cultural elites governs the second period, “Into the Realm of High Art, 1932–1933,” which positions Mickey as not just comics or entertainment, but as noteworthy artistic expression. His worldwide popularity is the focus of the third section, “‘You’re the Top,’ 1934–1935,’” and it features a rather charming piece by British novelist E. M. Forster, “Mickey and Minnie.” The next section, marked by Disney’s move into color and eventually feature animation, covers 1936–1939. The remaining three sections—“World War II into the Seventies, 1941–1977”; “The Nostalgia Begins, 1978–1989”; and “Into a New Millennium, 1991–2012”—noticeably span much larger periods, but the pieces therein are no less worthy or fascinating. Journalists, scholars, artists, and historians alike muse over Mickey Mouse, subtly charting his arguable decline in popularity, visibility, and relevance. The appendices feature the source texts for some of the selections originally written in languages other than English.

Before completing this book, Apgar, an art historian by training, had also recently completed what might be called a biography of Mickey entitled Mickey Mouse: Emblem of the American Spirit (2015), which is instructive in its contrast to A Mickey Mouse Reader. Published by Welden Owen in association with the Walt Disney Foundation Press, the 2015 volume falls somewhere between a biography and a coffee-table book. Noticeably missing in Mickey Mouse: Emblem of the American Spirit, however, is the darker side of Mickey Mouse: his place in underground art as a symbol of capitalism, commercialism, and Western imperialism as well as the character’s roots in the blackface minstrel tradition. The latter has been highlighted recently in Nicholas Sammond’s The Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (2015). Admittedly, to have access to such wonderful resources as Apgar is able to showcase in his biography, he may have had to tone down the less flattering side of Mickey’s past. This decision is rectified to an extent by the more complex Mickey we see in A Mickey Mouse Reader, such as in the piece by John Updike that alludes to Mickey’s racial origins.

Of course, Apgar’s collection shows that just as the critical response to Mickey Mouse has varied over the years, so too has the character himself. The Mickey of Steamboat Willie was far more impish than his current incarnation. This later Mickey has proven to be quite a thorn in the side of the Walt Disney Company, for audiences often perceive the character’s saccharine personality as timid and outdated. In addition to scholarly and critical pieces, Apgar includes a number of contemporary newspaper articles chronicling how changes in the times and the Walt Disney Company itself have prompted efforts to modernize and update the company’s brand from its family-friendly origins, despite an understandable desire to preserve the figure who was arguably responsible for it all.

Nevertheless, what ultimately unites the collection is a love...