Mickey Columbus

This week we celebrate another Columbus Day and as you all should know, Columbus discovered The New World or North America as we know it today.  Why would I bring this up on a blog about Disney?  Well, if you'll recall back in the '80s for a while there was a small resurgence of Mickey shorts being produced.   The plan was to have Disney Feature Animation deliver one new animated short starring the lovable Mouse every two years. This trend was kicked off with The Prince and The Pauper.    In '92 a short starring Mickey as Columbus was supposed to debut.  

The debut of this short would coincided with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.   Though for reasons unknown, this short along with three others such as a retelling of The Three Musketeers that would have included Jose Carioca as the famous quartet.     

While that short never got off the ground, we did eventually get a retelling of this classic tale using Disney characters that was done quite well.  Even if it was direct-to-video. Though it should have been a theatrical release in my humble opinion. I'm of course referring to Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers.

Now  I know very little about the plot of what Mickey Columbus.  Though I do understand that one of the reasons  that this short was canned is because Disney wasn't sure how to handle how should Mickey interact with the natives once he arrived to the new world.  For a better description I turn you to this quote from Jim Hill's article on this subject.

 Disney's storymen could never quite find a politically-correct way around the whole indigenous peopleproblem. In that -- once Columbus arrived in the New World -- this animated feaurette was going to have to show some sort of encounter between Capt. Mickey, his crew and the folks who were already living on Hispaniola. And Mouse House managers were concerned that -- if Disney Feature Animation played this scene for laughs -- it could wind up causing a lot of problems for the studio.

That is far and wide one of the biggest and perhaps most reasonable worries that Disney had about it short.  How do you go about this without upsetting people.  Now I know I have said in the past that I don't believe PC is a good thing but I can see where Disney is coming from with this concern.  They were worrisome that this scene come off the wrong way and offend people.  Yes, Disney had faced this before in the '40s when Song of The South was released and people called that film racist.  Claims that I find absurd but during this time, Disney had  just  started the Renaissance.  They couldn't take a chance like this after they had just pulled themselves out of the Dark Age.  While I don't agree with Disney about that scene, I do understand and respect where they were coming from in making that decision.



Something that perplexed me about this short was that if my memory is correct, this would be one of the few times that Mickey appeared in a short portraying an historical figure.  I mean, yes there are those nifty figurines of Mickey in Revolutionary War gear.

This would have been something completely different altogether.  Do  I think that Disney could have pulled it off?  Maybe if they had the historians working with the right animators on this short, we would be watching Mickey Columbus and ranking it up there along Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Prince and The Pauper as one of the greats.



Now another major reason that this short got canned had with a Little Mermaid.

Disney at the time saw the success of Mermaid and wanted to turn their attention to feature-length animation instead.  Rightly so, I will say because that has given us classics such as Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King.  Yes, even as a die hard Mickey Mouse fan, I do think that Disney made the right decision to focus on the films instead.  Nothing against the shorts, I love them but there is just something about a Disney movie that just feels grand.



Even still,  it would have been neat to see what Disney would have come up with for this short.  All we have to go by now is just the thought but hey that doesn't mean you can't find Mickey as Columbus as Disney has released various pins celebrating Columbus Day with Mickey appearing as the famous explorer.  Such as the one you saw at the beginning of this article or the one below.

In the end, it's hard to say what this short would have been like but learning about it piqued my interest enough to write this article.  What do you think? Do you think Disney should've made this short or not? Tell me in the comments. Peace!