STAGE AND SCREEN



Why does Mickey Mouse wear gloves? Are there any films in which he isn't wearing them? WALT DISNEY was pushed into creating Mickey Mouse by the fact that he had just lost the rights to an earlier character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Apart from the ears and tail the early Mickey is remarkably similar to Oswald and, like him, had no shoes and no gloves. In Plane Crazy, made as a silent film in l928 and released later with sound, Mickey is barefooted and barehanded. Gallopin' Gaucho (again silent, l928) sees Mickey in shoes for the first time and he kept them on for Steamboat Willie. The gloves came, I think, with either The Barn Dance (l928) or The Opry House (l929). As for the gloves, here's an explanation from Walt himself:'We didn't want him to have mouse hands, because he was supposed to be more human. So we gave him gloves. Five Fingers looked like too much on such a little figure, so we took one away. That was just one less finger to animate.' A very down-to-earth approach. And if you put gloves on a cartoon character, you don't have to animate all those wrinkles and lines. Incidentally, there's a similar evolutionary path that can be traced to the emergence of Bugs Bunny's gloves in A Wild Hare, Tex Avery's l94O cartoon that gave us the classic phrase, 'What's Up Doc?' Rolf Harris, Rolf's Cartoon Club, HTV West, Bristol. It was because there were no color films made yet so they were black and you couldnt see their hands so they put white gloves on then when colour came they just decided to keep them. Taylor, arlington texas



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