Even series tailored for preschool children, like "Rolie Polie Olie," a Disney cartoon about cute little robots, includes an Elvis impersonator.Ĭhildren don't automatically choose the lowest common denominator. Mickey's show is also light on sardonic pop-culture allusions, which is also remarkable in an era where every cartoon carries a double entendre.
MICKY MOUSE HOUSE MOVIE
Over the last few decades, pop tunes have replaced the alphabet as a television teaching tool: it's not surprising that "American Idol" on Fox and the Disney Channel movie "High School Musical" are so successful: television is one vast audition hall, and every viewer (and child actor) wants to be a pop star. During the instructional part of the show, there is a restful quiet that is mostly found only on public television programs. There is music on "Mickey Mouse Playhouse" but not too much: a new introductory theme song that spells out the letters of Mickey Mouse, but with a slight Caribbean lilt, and a finale, "Hot Dog!," both of them written and performed by the pop group They Might Be Giants. Future episodes will include retellings of classic fairy tales, and old characters will pop in, including Professor Von Drake and Mickey's nemesis, Pete the Cat, though without his cigar. Mickey and his friends enlist the help of viewers to find the missing sheep, which are hiding in almost plain view. In the premiere episode, Daisy has lost the sheep she was watching for Bo Peep (for some reason, ever since "Toy Story," Bo Peep has become the careless slacker of the nursery-rhyme crowd).
The stories are simple and aimed at children between the ages of 2 and 5. Meeska, Mooska, mommy will be right back. Nowadays, SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon seems like a more ubiquitous, familiar childhood icon than the mouse that founded the house of Disney.Įven on the Disney Channel, the morning programming can be bewildering for adults - a hectic firestorm of pop music and primary colors, from "The Wiggles," an Australian group of zany men who sing and dress like the Village People, to the Down Under accents of "The Koala Brothers." (Why can't cartoon characters speak properly, like Donald Duck?)Ĭhildren don't care, but parents and grandparents who were raised on the various incarnations of "The Mickey Mouse Club" and "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights, finally have someone they know and trust on the set when they wander away to do laundry or pour a stiff drink. Mickey's resurrection on television nevertheless marks a return to tradition for Disney, a media conglomerate whose brand has been stretched from the Magic Kingdom and movies like "Mulan" to ABC series like "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," as well as unsavory Disney alumnae like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. Now he has been whittled down to a Mister Rogers role - kindly and didactic.
MICKY MOUSE HOUSE PASSWORD
In a sense, Mickey has been demoted: the cartoon creature, who in his heyday chatted with Leopold Stokowski in "Fantasia" and was a hero of World War II (the password for Allied troops on D-Day was "Mickey Mouse"), is now teaching toddlers to count and identify shapes in a Sesame Streetish half-hour program that the network describes as "learning-focused."įor much of his television career, the mouse was more a master of ceremonies than a comic lead. "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse," a new series for preschool children that begins tonight on the Disney Channel, seeks to restore the primacy of the network's most famous character. For them, the mouse is the thing that directs the cursor on their computers. There is an entire generation of preschool viewers who know the Disney mascot as a decorative fillip on sports bottles, baby bibs and car floor mats. Mickey Mouse's most recent series, "House of Mouse," ended in 2003. The wondrous thing about the wonderful world of Disney is that at the moment it seems easier to see news shows featuring Michael D.
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