The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Places on Earth (81 page)

In practical terms,
Mickey’s Toontown
is simply a safety valve for always-congested
Fantasyland
, an additional three acres over which to distribute thousands of kids and their families.

But more meaningfully,
Mickey’s Toontown
is the tiny realm where kids are in control, where children rule a three-acre kingdom, their own Lilliputian
Disneyland
.  (How small is three acres?  Let’s put it this way:  The
Walt Disney Concert Hall
in Dowtown Los Angeles covers 3.5 acres; that means all of
Toontown
could fit into the concert hall footprint with room to spare.  And Biltmore House, the famous Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville, North Carolina, boasts
four
acres of floor space, making the house alone an acre larger than
Toontown
.)

You don’t need to be a child to embrace–and be embraced by–
Toontown
.  A colorful concretization of the toddler id,
Toontown
invites Guests of
all
ages to twist, skew, smash, and detonate things in a simulated frenzy of cartoon mayhem, to be mischievous, to be silly, to be eternally curious, and to touch everything–in short, to become a toddler again.

* * *

According to official
Disneyland
mythology,
Mickey’s Toontown
has long been a resort community, a playground and retreat for celebrity “toons” (a contraction of “cartoon”) like
Disney
’s
Fab Five
(
Mickey
,
Minnie
,
Donald
,
Goofy
, and
Pluto)
, as well as lesser luminaries like
Chip ‘n Dale
and
Daisy
.  The official seal on
Toontown
’s town hall declares that the community was established in 1928, the year
Mickey
was created.

H
umans other than
Walt
weren’t invited into this
‘toon
community until 1993, when the
‘toons
decided to let people join in all the fun.  (For more about the official history of
Mickey’s Toontown
, see the yellow
Landmark 3 ½
sign at the top of the sloping entrance promenade just before you turn east (right) toward
Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin
.)

Like the
Main Street Cinema
and the
Partners
statue in the
Central Plaza
(
Hub
),
Mickey’s Toontown
is one of the park sites where the connection between
Walt
and
Mickey
is most deeply felt. 
Walt
’s vision and restless spirit propelled him into ever more complex endeavors and triumphs in his career, but as he was famous for saying, it was all started by a mouse.

Mickey
was always something of a double or alter ego of his creator.  Like
Walt
,
Mickey
is a talented everyman, practical and ordinary, but full of the ingenuity, energy, and can-do optimism that make giants of everymen—or everywomen—in the United States.

Beginning in the early 1920’s,
Walt
’s career was propelled forward by cartoon shorts and characters that he created, beginning with his initial, short-lived
Laugh-O-Gram
productions, the
Alice
shorts that combined a live-action girl with cartoon worlds, and then his cartoon character
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
.  Still very young and somewhat naïve during the
Oswald
days,
Walt
found himself cheated by some business shenanigans.  Avoiding a legal battle that would’ve been costly in time and money,
Walt
surrendered his rights to the
Oswald
character, to start over free and clear.

It’s easy to see in retrospect that he made the right choice
, but at the time it was a gutsy move with no guarantee of success.  Luckily for
Walt
, his business partner and brother
Roy
, and for the world, it was almost immediately after bidding
Oswald
“goodbye” that
Walt
and his friend and animator
Ub Iwerks
crafted
Mickey Mouse
.

Walt
had known some local fame in his late teen years when he developed brief animated ads for movie theaters, and he had had success on a larger scale with the
Alice
and
Oswald
shorts, but
nothing
could’ve prepared him for the dazzling popularity of
Mickey Mouse
.

It took some maneuvering
and strokes of genius to get
Mickey
into theaters, and once again
Walt
had to deal with a ruthless New York business partner, but as soon as the brilliant
Steamboat Willie
and the subsequent
Mickey
cartoons reached an audience,
Mickey
was an instant and sustainable hit.

Steamboat Willie
debuted in 1928. 
Walt
had gone through heck and back to have a properly synched soundtrack created for the short, but he knew it was worth it.  Sound was the future, specifically a soundtrack melded to the film.  Young
Walt
understood this while older execs and moguls were still calling movies-with-sound a fad.  And when
Walt
was sure of his vision, nothing stopped him.

Steamboat Willie
and the
Mickey
cartoons that followed in 1928, 1929, and 1930 were tremendously successful.  In 1930
Walt
found a powerful ally in Harry Cohn of Columbia, and finally extricated himself from the clutches of crafty New York business partner
Pat Powers
.
Mickey
was
Walt
’s!

A
sad note was
Ub Iwerk
’s sudden defection to
Powers
’ organization, but
Walt
,
Roy
, and the remaining animators forged ahead.  In addition to
Mickey
cartoons, brilliant stand-alone
Silly Symphony
shorts like
Skeleton Dance
gave
Walt
and his team another outlet for pushing the envelope of animation’s creative possibilities.

Mickey
was lightning in a bottle. 
Mickey
was the foundation of
Walt
’s subsequent success, and the success of anyone and any company associated with
Mickey
. 
Herman Kamen
joined
Walt
’s team in 1932 and masterminded the licensing of
Mickey
’s image, the foundation of the lucrative
Disney
merchandising arm that today is an empire unto itself.  (Anyone who’s seen a child melt down over a
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
toy gets this.)

In his book
Walt Disney:  An American Original
,
Bob Thomas
relays the impact that
Mickey
had on one particular company. Timepiece manufacturer
Ingersoll-Waterbury Company
, circling the drain in the early 1930’s, was galvanized by a license to craft watches bearing
Mickey
’s image.  To keep up with demand, they had to increase their staff
tenfold
, from 300 to 3,000, and within two years they sold 2.5 million
Mickey
watches.  The stats are telling;
Mickey
wasn’t just popular; he was a phenomenon.

A lot has been written about the symbiotic relationship between
Walt
and his creation.  In some mysterious way,
Walt
was
Mickey
and
Mickey
was
Walt
, in the way that writers and their words, artists and their images, actors and their roles, filmmakers and their films, musicians and their music, dancers and their steps, magicians and their illusions, and mathematicians and their equations end up mirroring each other in an echo chamber of infinite reverberations.  Creator and creation are inextricably linked and perpetually shape each other.

Ub Iwerks
was instrumental in shaping
Mickey
’s original look and movements, but
Mickey
’s essence was pure
Walt
.  Lest anyone doubt that it was
Walt
more than
Ub
who created and breathed life into
Mickey
, remember that
Ub
defected soon after
Mickey
was created, yet
Mickey
and his cartoons remained high-quality and phenomenally entertaining all throughout the 1930’s, when
Ub
had left
Disney
. 
Walt
voiced
Mickey
for the first twenty years, and he made the call on all of
Mickey
’s plots, actions, and attitudes.

Imagineers
,
Disney
historians, and
Walt
’s acquaintances and family members seem to agree uniformly that
Mickey
was an avatar of
Walt
.  If you consider
Walt
as a sort of magic lamp, with all sorts of wonderful stories and landscapes and characters within him that he constantly shared with the world, the ultimate genie of the lamp, the inner spirit of
Walt
outwardly realized, was
Mickey Mouse
.  Gumption, humor, curiosity, positivity, inventiveness, creativity, humility, and humanity … pure
Mickey
, and pure
Walt
.

There’s a terrific and telling illustration of
Mickey
sitting in front of an easel, sketching a character, and what he’s sketching is
Walt
’s face.  In the picture, it appears as if
Mickey
created
Walt
, instead of the other way around, and that’s as true as anything written or sketched about the pair.

It makes sense, then, that
Mickey
’s home would reflect
Walt
’s home in the initial days of his Hollywood success, and that
Mickey
’s town,
Toontown
, would in some ways resemble Hollywood in that early time period, the 1920’s and 1930’s.  There’s even a
Toontown
sign on the hills behind
Mickey’s House
that is an unmistakable nod to the famous real-life “Hollywood” sign.  If
Main Street
channels
Walt
’s boyhood home of
Marceline
,
Missouri
, then
Mickey’s Toontown
is in some senses a cartoon mirror of
Walt
’s adult landscape in Hollywood and
Holmby Hills
–although
Toontown
has its own spin on
Main Street
as well.

* * *

When
Toontown
was designed and constructed, no matter what biographical echoes from
Walt
’s life were to be built into the landscape,
Toontown
had to be above all other considerations
an immersive cartoon world
. Just as Guests entering
Frontierland
feel as if they’ve stepped into a Western film, Guests arriving in
Mickey’s Toontown
were to feel as if, like
Mary Poppins
and
Bert
, they’d stepped through a flat image into a three-dimensional, living and breathing cartoon world.  It’s a place where
Mickey
and
Minnie
and other
‘toons
genuinely exist.