Magician Mickey

In this short, Mickey is performing magic tricks on stage while Goofy does all the behind the scenes work, even though all of Mickey's tricks seem to be for real.

But Donald, as usual, isn't convinced and causes a fuss with his loud sarcasm and shouting. Mickey quickly silences him by using his magic. Donald becomes part of the act and is humiliated in various ways. It's actually quite imaginative and much better than the usual Mickey cartoons.

If only Mickey (who only has one line here) consistently kept to this high standard. He really needs Donald to make him funnier than he is and it's pretty obvious in this cartoon that the laughs come from angry Duck.

STORY- Same story structure formula used with the hilarious Boat Builders.

Beginning: Join 3 opposite characters in same adventure.

Progress: Let them build a moving sensitive action-packed construction.

Ending: Destroy the construction as a sum of all 3 heroes' faults.

SETTINGS - My favorite. Proscenium Arch.

HEROES - Mickey Mouse on the stage facing his fans and audience applausing him for his mind and hand tricks.

Goofy on the backstage working as a light technician reference to Nikola Tesla.

Donald Duck as a nasty prank-maker who confronts Mickey's tricks by his own brutal force pranks.

MOTIVE - Donald does not enjoy Mickey's magician tricks. So he jumps off to the stage mockering and making a fool out of Mickey. But Mickey has enough magician tools to cause Donald bigger troubles than he can ever imagine. Goofy in the meantime does not interfere with the duo, yet he cannot run the show focusing the light and effects on more than one host. By the final prank Donald does it to Mickey, Goofy totally fails to maintain the backstage and the entire theatre falls apart nail to nail.

Mickey is a master magician. He is utterly amazing. The problem is a heckler in the audience, Donald Duck. Mr. Duck is abusive and confrontational (really?). He begins to try to sabotage the act, but it only leads to greater and greater tricks where Donald becomes the victim. In true cartoon tradition, Donald will not let it go. It soon becomes a color extravaganza, with Goofy, the stage hand, getting his two cents worth in.

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.

Donald Duck will live to regret the evening he decided to heckle the performance of MAGICIAN MICKEY.

This is a wonderful little film from Disney's Golden Age, full of excellent animation and truly hilarious legerdemain. The pyrotechnic prestidigitation at the conclusion, involving stagehand Goofy, makes a spectacular use of Technicolor. Walt Disney provides Mickey with his squeaky voice; Clarence Nash does the honors for Donald.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.

In "Magician Mickey", the mouse is trying to put on a magic show and inexplicably, Donald does everything he can to be a nuisance and destroy the act. However, Mickey seems to have god-like powers and again and again, he uses them to thwart Donald....yet Donald keeps coming back for more!

Like all the Mickey and friends cartoons of the 1930s, this one is gorgeously animated and is head and shoulders better looking than the competition, such as MGM and Warner Brothers. Beautiful backgrounds, smooth animation AND no cutesy songs (a problem in many 30s cartoon shorts) make this well worth seeing....and it's among the better shorts by Disney. A delight.