Mickey Plays Mickey

Draw some circles and you have Mickey Mouse. Well, you have the Mickey Mouse of 1929, the one who played animals as musical instruments and cavorted around cuspidors and outhouses, back when synchronising sound was enough of a novelty to capture the audience’s attention.

In Mickey’s Follies (1929), Mickey plays sings and plays several instruments. And himself.

He plays a saxophone two different ways.



He plays his buttons, his head and his butt.



His tail helps him play his teeth.



He plays a trombone and thrusts the slide at the audience in the theatre; early Disney sound cartoons always seem to have something coming at or coming away from the camera in a late ‘20s try at 3-D perspective.



The gag seems to be how many “funny” shapes the rubberised trombone can be made into. And there’s the old cartoon gag (I’m sure it was old in 1929, too) where someone blows into an instrument or a balloon or at birthday candles so hard, their body contracts to almost nothing.



All this happens to the background strains of the song “Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo,” co-written by Carl Stalling (who, I’m guessing, played the piano in this short) and making its film bow.