A urban legend circulates for a long time among fans of Mickye Mouse toons of 1930s: there would be a re-mastered copy of a never published video. It would be a continuous loop of Mickey Mouse walking in front of six buildings: sequence repeats for about 2 to 3 minutes before fade out.

According to some reviews published online, it seems that the sequence, instead of the usual melodies, ends with a loop of dissonant tunes, played on the piano, for about a minute and a half, and then become a static background noise till the end of the short movie. Would it be a sort of demo video, a work never completed? Maybe, but it's not sure.

Such a strange Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse in the sequence it's not like the one we all know and love, which dances, sings and smiles: this one is just walkin, with a regular expression on its face, but with a head swinging from one side to the other that gives it a droopy and pained look really uncommon. So far is the story that everybody knows, but the legend that is circulating online is much more dark.

Some years ago the American film critic and historian Leonard Maltin would have started to review the cartoon, but founding it too poor to be published. Anyweay, wanting to include it in his database, would have obtained a digitised copy and would notice that the whole sequence lasted 9 minutes and 45 seconds. Following the fading the video would kept with black screen until minute six.

A sinister audio

At this point the scene returned on Mickey Mouse walking, but background music was different: it was some murmuring, a sort of bubbling cry. As the noise grew in tone, the picture started to become weird, the sidewalk seemed to moving in impossible directions due to the physical properties of Mickey Mouse walking.

The face of the famous Walt Disney's character, moreover, stated to slowly curl into a gruesome satisfied smile. At minute seven the murmur would turn into an horrible scream, while the picture would became darker, with the emergence of colour (which was impossible given the period of the original movie).

Horrific sequence

At this point Mickey Mouse face would have literally broke down, its eyes rolled under the chin like balls into a fishbowl, its smile wouold have curled upward left side of its face. Meanwhile buildings would have turned into ruins floating in mid air, while sidewalk kept moving in physically impossible directions.

Here would have been over the showing of the movie by Leonard Maltin, who would have asked to an assistant to complete the video viewing writing down every detail and then to put it in the archive. According to the assistant's notes, the scream would have lasted until some seconds after minute eight, when the scene would have narrow on the face of Mickey Mouse, with a background noise like a broken carillon.

A bloody movie?

After reviewed the sequence, Maltin's assistant would come out, in a state of collapse, would have repeated for seven times “the real pain is not yet known”, would have unharmed a security guard and would have killed himself with his gun.

Thereafter would have found out that the last frame of the whole video, surely very different from classical Disney's, would bring this Cyrillic text (something rather weird for an American cartoon of the 1930s): “The views of Hell bring back one's seen them”.

Any relation with “Suicidemouse.avi” you can find online?

No one else should have seen that video since then, but on Youtube and peer to peer software like Rapidshare circulated for a while some videos entitled “Suicidemouse.avi”, lasting 9 minutes 45 seconds, black and white, with a Mickey Mouse walking in front of some buildings, in a loop, a long black sequence and again some frames of Mickey Mouse with a dissonant audio and strange screeching scream, besides a final Cyrillic phrase.

I must point out that I watched them for a few moments, in the preview, jumping from one point to another of the sequence, but I preferred don't look at them in full: does anyone know if they are just fanmade copies or are they duplicated of the original movie and, in this case, whether have they ever caused suicides? If you are afraid that the right answer is the latter, maybe you should not look at them.