UNIVERSALITY OF "MICKEY"

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21363, 4 January 1935, Page 5

UNIVERSALITY OF "MICKEY"

FROM ENGLAND TO MANCHOULI WALT DISNEY'S POPULAR CREATION After a quick trip round the world—covering 20,000 miles at least—l have returned to New York to say that Mickey Mouse has been with me most of the time, says a writer in the "New York Times." On the Pacific, in Japan and China, at Manchouli—-suspended precariously between Siberia and Manchukuo—and hi England. Even when I missed him I knew that actually he was not far away. In Canada, for example; but I could not be expected to meet him on the train. When the Canadian Pacific shows moving pictures every night on the journey across the North American continent he will be there. And Minnie! The isolation of a liner crossing the Pacific is more apparent than real. It is, as a matter of fact, a thing of the past. The radio, the ocean telephone, the daily newspaper to be found on the table at lunch, wireless news briefs pinned to the bulletin boards maintain constant contact with the five continents. The world is still very much with us even aboard the Empress of Japan crossing that vast ocean between Vancouver and Yokohama. On Board Ship The motion picture at sea emphasises one's contact with civilisation almost as much as the radio newspaper. It is impossible to feel adrift on a boundless ocean while watching Eddie Cantor in "The Kid From Spain." Or the antics of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The adventures of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse make a tremendous hit before an ocean audience, just as they do in all the cities of the world where they are shown. The extraordinarily interesting fact is that Mickey Mouse's crazy and amazing deeds appeal just as strongly to the sophisticated as to the average man, woman, or child. Men of affairs, writers, lawyers, captains of industry, statesmen, outwardly stiff in dress suits and starched shirts; clever women, leaders of society, smartly gowned in dresses from Paris and Fifth avenue—all abandon themselves to the full enjoyment of Mickey Mouse. Genuine laughter, with sheer delight in it, follows him from one astoundingly ingenious feat to another. And at the end they applaud in such a way that you know they mean it. In the Orient In theatre after theatre in Tokyo Mickey appears. It is fascinating to see his familiar outline on the billboards surrounded by intricate designs which might have been made by an artistic fly—designs mysterious to us but not to the Japanese who go to the box office to spend their yens and sens for a sight of Mickey. I strolled along the Ginza, Tokyo's

bazaar street, where the sidewalks are lined with stalls, and where men, women, and children, some in Western, some in Japanese dress, walk endlessly. Here you buy toys as cleverly conceived and executed as anything from Germany, home of toys. And here the Japanese buy models of Mickey Mouse. The foreigners buy Japanese dolls; the Japanese buy Mickey. On a crowded railroad station walked a Japanese woman. As conservative as Japan could make her in her dress—kimono, obi, getas. It was a hot day and she was using her fan. Suddenly I took a lively interest in that fan. It was a Mickey Mouse fan. There he was, the lad himself. Perhaps the greatest surprise of the trip was when I met Mickey and Minnie in Manchouli. There they were as large as life and twice as natural, looking at me from a store window. In Manchouli I had just come up from Harbin, where, by the way, the waters of a devastating flood came nearly up to the railroad, and where from the window we saw houses flooded to the roofs and a vast area covered by water as though by a lake. Manchouli was the transfer station from the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Trans-Siberian. There was time to kill before the train started. I took a walk. Don't think of Manchouli as a desolate land or a cold, forbidding waste. It is neither. And yet I began thinking of tiny communities in North Norway and Spitsbergen cut off from civilisation, inhabited by a few sturdy folk who do not mind loneliness. Mickey Mouse, pampered by the easy life of New Lark, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, might be forgiven for niissing Manchouli. But there he was —with Minnie. An Exception But Mickey did not get on the train and enter the Soviet Union. The Russians have a Mickeyesque character of their own, but Mickey himself has not yet been admitted. The Soviet comrades would have given him all the furs and caviare he could use—more than he could use. —but they were not prepared to part with valuta (good American dollarsi for the privilege of cheering up the workers when taking time off in the upbuilding of the second Five-Year Plan. It is not that Mickey is too frivolous for men and women creating a new world—one must rest even during the construction ox Utopia—but, when there is not enough money to go round, some one must suffer. So Mickey must wait for his visa into the U. S. S. R. In England Mickey is everywhere, of course. But I saw him in Colchester, oldest town in Britain —old even before the Romans turned it into a colony. Mickey's antics were delighting an audience assembled within the walls the Romans built. Somewhere in that town lived Old King Cole. Now Old King Cole is a nursery rhyme sharing with Mickey the affections of children.