The Nifty Nineties

A bit of a chore to get through. The characters have no personality and nothing interesting happens. It seems to be more to showcase an 1890s look without any substance.

I saw this cartoon on the Disney Channel last summer and taped it along with 25 other Mickey Mouse cartoons. It shows Mickey as the owner of a brand new (ancient by today's standards)automobile in the gay (which in those days meant happy) nineties. He and Minnie go to a vaudeville show. I first saw this cartoon on a video that I rented back when I was in 1st grade. When this short came on and moved to the scene with Minnie and Mickey entering the vaudeville theatre,the two mice sit down and a slide show comes on. The slide show was entiteld "Father Dear Father" and was about a woman who had a drunken husband that refused to come home from the bar. Minnie began crying and Mickey comforts her saying, "It's okay, Minnie. It's just a show!" When I saw this same short on TV, however, the "Father Dear Father" scene had been cut. I think it's kind of stupid how they cut out scenes like this. I can understand why they would edit out ethnical stereotypes though.

I'm not much for Mickey cartoons made after the late 1930s, but here I'll make an exception. This is a cute short which looks back to the Gay Nineties, gently poking fun at the fashions, cars, and entertainment of the time. Though Mickey is not the rascally fellow he was in shorts such as Steamboat Willie (1928), he's still entertaining enough here and has amusing animation.

I'd recommend that you see it at least once if you love classic Disney animation and need to kill some time, or if you love that particular time period. Also, look out for cameos by animators Ward Kimball and Fred Moore during the vaudeville sequence!

This short is a delightful look at the 1890s-a time not so far removed chronologically from 1941-and the use of Mickey and Minnie as a courting couple is a perfect fit for the whole concept. Enjoyable now, back then, large segments of the audience back then probably could recall the timeframe from personal experience. Well animated, as is generally the case with Disney at the time, it's good to see this in print. Well worth watching. Recommended.

The Nifty Nineties has to be one of my favourite Mickey Mouse cartoons. The Technicolour animation is beautiful, vibrantly coloured in fluid in movement. Equally as wonderful is the music, from the nostalgic strains of the strings as Mickey and Minnie walk into the vaudeville theatre to the jauntiness of the Fred Ward-caricatured Two Boys from Illinois scene the incidental music is a sheer delight, while of the songs Father Dear Father is a perfect merging of image and music and is incredibly emotional, Strolling Through the Park is a song I appreciate much more now(for some reason it was always the song I remembered least from The Nifty Nineties) and In The Good Old Summertime is wonderfully nostalgic and amorous. I loved seeing the fashions, cars and bicycles of the 1890s too, and also the cameos of Goofy, Donald, Daisy, Donald's Three Nephews and a horse that looks oddly reminiscent of the horse from Wind in the Willows. And if you're wondering where the why did the chicken cross the road? joke came from, look no further than here. Overall, a timeless and still wonderful cartoon, that fills me with nostalgia and happiness every single time I watch it. 10/10 Bethany Cox