View: With Disney’s copyright ending, two films are taking the mickey out of the world’s most lovable mouse
stormtroopers. No sooner had the 95-year copyright on the world's most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse, ended earlier this month, a couple of US movie-makers turned the lovable cartoon character created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in 1928, into the scary star of two horror films.
A YouTube trailer of the first, called Mickey's Mouse Trap, was released scant hours after the expiry of the copyright and showed a human in a Mickey mask terrorising a group of teenagers in an amusement arcade, while the accompanying onscreen text read: 'A place for fun.
A place for friendship. A place for hunting.
The Mouse is out.'
'We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it's… Mickey Mouse murdering people,' the movie's director was quoted as saying.
For the second Mickey-the-Menace movie, as yet untitled, the film's tagline on social media reads, 'A late-night boat ride turns into a desperate fight for survival in New York City when a mischievous mouse becomes a monstrous reality.'
Both movies draw their sinister inspiration from Mickey's 1928 debut in the short film, Steamboat Willy, in which the protagonist looked more like a ferrety rat than the cuddly mouse of his later avatar, wearing his hallmark red shorts, bright yellow shoes, and insouciant grin.
The proto-Mickey of Steamboat Willy had an elongated snout and was the captain of a steamer in which he stored bizarre musical instruments made from animal bones.
Mickey was turned from a repellent rat — idiomatically, a 'rat' is a betrayer of associates; rats carried the bubonic plague which annihilated half of medieval Europe — to a cute mouse.
