Epic Mickey and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Ignited My Interest in Old Movies
For Christmas 2010, I received a new video game for the Nintendo Wii called EPIC MICKEY. The 3D platformer was a full-fledged, “AAA” treatment for the iconic Disney character, and its angle was really cool. Essentially, it got to the heart of original incarnations of the character, providing a strange kind of “karma” system that allowed you to play mischievously or nobly. It also leaned hard into “forgotten” Disney lore, reviving Oswald the Lucky Rabbit essentially for the first time since the company reacquired him from Universal in 2006. Unfortunately, neither concept fulfilled its promise. The painting mechanics of EPIC MICKEY were fun, but its karma wrinkle felt like it was attempting to capitalize on a current trend, one ignited by designer Warren Spector himself years earlier. And the idea of exploring obscure Disney history essentially started and ended with Oswald, with some minor characters coming into the cool, Disneyland-inspired areas; it just wasn’t expansive enough in this premise as I would have liked.
And I remember feeling this way at the time, even though I wasn’t even really sure what I would have liked to see. But I do know that my interests were starting to turn to the history of cartoons, a turning point I now recognize as the very instigator for my current, all-consuming exploration of old movies. Even as it is, though, EPIC MICKEY served as an amazing catalyst for my seeking out of old cartoons, even if it took some time for it turn to full-fledged hobby and pursuit. Oswald himself served as the perfect icon for someone even remotely interested in the history of animation: he was Disney’s mascot before Mickey Mouse! And as I would learn later, his time with Disney was brief (about a year), before distributor Universal exercised their legal rights and took over the intellectual property from Walt. More than a proto-Mickey in sheer chronology, many Oswald character traits and gags would make their way into early Mickey Mouse shorts. That made them the perfect counterparts in a game exploring Disney and Mickey’s early history, even if its ambition outshone its execution.
But let me be clear: I like EPIC MICKEY. I think it’s fun. But perhaps its greatest contribution, for the video game-centered teen I was, was opening me up to films that were over 80 years old at the time. The fantastic side-scrolling episodes accomplished this in gameplay; they put Mickey into recreations of specific cartoons from his history like (obviously) STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928) and YE OLDEN DAYS (1933). I had a particular connection to the latter, since it was a bonus on a home video release of my favorite Disney movie, ROBIN HOOD (1973). And then the game actually offered a few full cartoons! And that’s how I saw OH WHAT A KNIGHT (1928, which also received its own level), an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon that YE OLDEN DAYS echoed five years later.
In fact, it was in rewatching OH WHAT A KNIGHT that I realized EPIC MICKEY’s connection to the very course that led me to rewatching the cartoon in the first place. EPIC MICKEY and its recreation of Disney history, obscure or not, touched a curious place in my mind, an infection that festered until I looked into the beginning experiments of film and what seemed like ancient movie magic. I’ve written before about how A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902) began my obsessive, practical approach to watching films throughout the earliest years of the art form’s existence, but it was EPIC MICKEY and OH WHAT A KNIGHT that led me to Disney’s first films, the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, and his first true mascot, the live action girl in an animated world, Alice.
It was really there that I discovered that hereditary nostalgia imparted by these works of art from what was essentially another world; I felt like I was glimpsing something special, like I was discovering something no one else had really considered in today’s day and age. Of course, that wasn’t the case, but then I would learn about and discover and enter a community that cared about these relics. And kind of fittingly for me, a kid who played a lot of video games and turned off all the live action shows on TV and stuck to the cartoons, it started with Mickey Mouse and EPIC MICKEY.
