Word: mickey
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...Mickey Mouse turns 80 years old today, and there's not a gray hair on him. Sure, he's a little rounder, a little squatter, and he's been wearing the same clothes for decades, but all in all he looks pretty good. Sure, Mickey hasn't had a movie in two years (his last one went direct-to-video), but his cheerful face remains one of the most recognizable images in the world, even beating out Santa Claus. Disney threw a big party for the mouse's 75th birthday, so this year's festivities will be comparatively subdued...
...Mickey's story, however, starts with a rabbit. Disney Brothers Studio was just another cog in Universal Pictures' animation machine when, in 1927, Walt Disney created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. With his round, white face, big button nose and floppy black ears, the smiling Oswald was an instant hit and Universal ordered a series of shorts. When Disney met with executives to negotiate another contract in 1928, the rabbit was still riding high and the animator thought he had the upper hand. Instead, the studio told him that it had hired away all of his employeees...
...first two Mickey shorts drew no attention, but then came Steamboat Willie, the first animation to feature synchronized music and sound effects, hit the screen. The film premiered in New York on Nov. 18, 1928 and was an instant hit. A series of Mickey Mouse shorts appeared within a matter of months - including Plane Crazy, a short that predated Steamboat Willie in which Mickey plays a rodent Charles Lindbergh. The mouse was a national fad by the end of the year, and it wasn't long before the real genius of Walt Disney kicked in: marketing. Walt quickly started...
...Campaign, allowing the activist to talk up new federal funding for AIDS treatment in Africa. When someone asked about problems at the polls, he hinted at the registration problems he has hammered on elsewhere. But then he told a joke. "By the way, I heard that Mickey Mouse is registered in Florida," he said. "I don't know if we need to investigate that because I think the big rat is a Republican...
What the story really revealed is an ecology that Mickey Kaus of Slate calls the "undernews": stories, true and false, that percolate in the blogs or tabloids until the "respectable" press is forced to soil its white gloves, just as what happened with the John Edwards love-child story. (Wow, how long ago was that? The 1980s...