The Chain Gang

'The Chain Gang' is a delightful Mickey Mouse short from his early sound period. I was surprised that this one features Mickey in prison (on a chain gang, no less), and we're never told how he came to be there in the first place. The cartoon manages to imply that he's guilty of something, rather than stitched up.

I'll just address a couple of points that modern viewers might miss. IMDb viewer Ron Oliver says that Mickey performs something called 'the classic "Prisoner's Song"' (I must have missed that one) in this cartoon. That's not correct. Mickey and the other inmates perform a maudlin waltz-time ballad that was very well-known in 1930, when this cartoon was made: so well-known that Disney didn't even bother to have his voice artists sing the words, apparently figuring that cinema audiences would recognise the song from its melody alone.

The song which Mickey and the others are performing has a lyric which begins like this: "If I had the wings of an angel, / Over these prison walls I would fly...". Since I recognised the melody, I thought it quite funny that these cartoon inmates were performing this particular song.

Many of the early Disney toons were quite vulgar, with gags featuring racial stereotypes or crudities such as Mickey playing a melody on a female dog's nipples. The nearest we get to such things in 'The Chain Gang' is one visual gag quite early in the toon. When the warder (played by Big Pete) threatens Mickey, the mouse raises one hand in a placating gesture with fingers splayed. Then he turns his head into profile to look at his own hand. At this point, Mickey grins mysteriously and then drops his hand. If you look closely, for one brief instant Mickey's head and hand are in just the proper position so that he's thumbing his nose. In the 1930s (and earlier) the gesture of thumb to nose was considered extremely vulgar in the United States; if Disney had tried this gag a few years later, with the Hays Office in place, he likely wouldn't have got away with it.

I shan't spoil the end of the cartoon for you. It was a big surprise for me, since Mickey ended up someplace unexpected. I'll rate 'The Chain Gang' 7 out of 10. Now that nobody recognises (nor stigmatises) the nose-thumbing gesture anymore, parents can put this cartoon on their family viewing list.

In this black and white short, Mickey Mouse is in prison. God only knows what on earth Mickey Mouse could've done to deserve this. The first half is a musical sequence with the prisoners dancing around the prison yard. The rest of the short deals with an escape attempt by Mickey. All around, it's only mildly amusing.

"The Chain Gang" is a black & white cartoon from Disney. While you might see it floating about in color, it's been colorized...and isn't as pristine looking as some of the colorized early Mickey cartoons.

The first thing I thought when I watched this one was "How in the heck would Mickey end up in prison?!"! After all, although Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy did some comedies set on a chain gang, this is Mickey Mouse....the internationally beloved cartoon character here!! Well, you never actually learn why he's in prison and he spends much of the film trying to escape....and Pegleg Pete is bent on keeping him there.

Compared to other cartoons of the day, this one is superior. But it's also a bit grim and not quite right....mostly because you just cannot picture good old Mickey committing crimes! Weird...but watchable.

The early Mickey Mouse cartoons show a Mickey different from the solid, dependable mouse we've grown to know in his later years. Could it be that, in his formative years, Mickey was a scamp and a rapscallion? Actually, Mickey displays the same irreverence the Marx Brothers display and The Chain Gang is a prime example. Very good cartoon and one that will see print again. It surely deserves to and soon. Well worth tracking down. Recommended.

In Mickey Mouse's twenty-first cartoon for Walt Disney Productions, Mickey is a convict in prison who participants in a breakout. A guard emerges from the building with two dogs that sniff the trail of the escapees. According to author Gijs Grob, an expert on Mickey Mouse, "These hounds are possibly the most elaborately designed and most naturally behaving animals in any theatrical cartoon hitherto." One of the dogs eventually morphed into the Disney character Pluto. The cartoon, August 1930's "The Chain Gang," marked the first appearance of one of Disney's more popular animated creations.

Ub Iwerks, who had been with Disney from the start of his business career and was responsible for first sketching the Mickey Mouse character, left Walt in May 1930. One of his replacements was Norm Ferguson, a cameraman with the company since 1929, who switched to the drawing board despite no formal art training. An early assignment of his was to draw the two hounds chasing Mickey. Ferguson modeled the dogs after his own English Pointer. He received praise from his colleagues after "The Chain Gang" was released. Don Graham, an in-house art instructor at Disney, describes "The dogs were alive, real. They seemed to breathe. They moved like dogs, not drawings of dogs. The drawings explained not so much what a real dog looked like, but what a real dog did."

First named Rover in October 1930's 'The Picnic,' as Minnie's pet, Pluto received his permanent name as Mickey's dog in May 1931's 'The Moose Hunt.' The lively dog was reportedly named after the newly discovered (dwarf) planet, Pluto, in the spring of 1930. He's the only animal friend of Mickey's who doesn't have human traits, unlike his counterpart dog Goofy. He communicates with facial and physical expressions as well as barking and grunting. But he's been a popular figure for Disney, appearing in 24 Mickey Mouse films and 90 cartoons from 1930 until 1953. He's seen in several Disney feature films and is currently one of the star attractions at both Disney parks.