Cinema: Father Goose

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Along a mud track in the Belgian Congo, a district officer peacefully cycled on his rounds. All at once he heard shrieks of terror, and a horde of natives plunged past him, screaming a word he had never heard before. "Mikimus!" they cried in horror, "Mikimus!" Drawing his revolver, the officer went forward on foot to investigate. At the entrance to the village he staggered back, as out of the depths of the equatorial forest, 2,000 miles from civilization, came shambling toward him the nightmare figure of a shaggy, gigantic Mickey Mouse.

It was only the local witch doctor, up to his innocent tricks. His usual voo had lost its do, and in the emergency, he had invoked, by making a few passes with needle and thread, the familiar spirit of that infinitely greater magician who has cast his spell upon the entire world—Walt Disney. Indeed, not since the Age of Fable, not since Mage Merlin and Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire has such power of pixilation been granted as this son of North Chicago carries in his thumb. From the magic hand of Disney has come hippety-hoppeting, tippety-squeaketing, quackety-racketing the most cheerful plague of little animals that has ever been visited on humankind.

New Mythology. By the hundreds they have swarmed across a hundred thousand movie screens from Aliquippa to Zagazig —mice that talk and grubs that chainsmoke, squirrels wearing overalls, bashful bunnies, sexy goldfish, tongue-tied ducks and hounds on ice skates, dachshunds bow-tied, pigs at pianos, chickens doing Traviata—even worms that do the cootch.

In the last few years there has been added to all this hilariously unnatural history a beautiful and often tender and serious attempt, in a series of camera essays on plant and animal life, to see the natural world as it really and painfully is. Aesop on the assembly line, mythology in mass production—whatever it may be called, Disneyism has swept the world.

In the last 25 years an estimated one billion people—more than a third of the world's population—have seen at least one of Disney's 657 films, most of which are dubbed in 14 languages. And one taste of a Disney picture makes millions of moviegoers cry for more. Disney takes pleasure—and enormous profit, of course —in gratifying this hunger. Thirty million 10¢ copies of Walt Disney Comic Books are bought in 26 countries every month, and 100 million copies of more expensive editions (from 25¢ to $2.95) have been bought since 1935. Songs from Disney pictures sell $250,000 worth of records and sheet music annually. Since 1933 more than $750 million worth of merchandise featuring the Disney characters—740 companies currently make 2,928 items, from Mickey Mouse weathervanes to Pluto paper slotties to Donald Duck toidy seats—has crossed the counters of the world.