The First Mickey Mouse Strips--
"Lost on a Desert Island": Plane Crazy

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Though it might have been shown in a couple of panels, the strips omits the near misses with cars coming the opposite way (a very nice point of view sequence in the film).
Here again, despite the cartoony touches (the bending plane in the first panel), the strip is a bit more "realistic", or at least, dramatic: the church spire does not bend (typical animation fare) and is destroyed: the sense of danger is greater, as objects and buildings are now longer endowed with life and therefore cannot avoid the hero, but stand as immovable obstacles.

 


In the first cartoon shorts, Mickey Mouse was quite mischievous and even liabel to resort to a little dirty trick, as in this scene, where he wants to kiss Minnie; when she refuses, he tries to scare her into kissing him by making a looping, making her fall out of the plane, catching her, and kissing her.
Given the rapid success of the films and the character, such attitude was very soon outruled; by 1930, it is clear Mickey can only be the all-around good guy, and such episodes are therefore not depicted; the Mickey & Minnie dating strips consist of mere cutsy little gags.

 


Mickey's attitude prompts Minnie to slap him and bail out of the plane, suing her underpants as a parachute.
Mickey's rude attitude
is left out in the strip's story, and Minnie falls out accidentally (January 21) as the plane is "out of control" (January 20).

 

 

Mickey tried to catch Minnie before she jumped, and now walks back in the air toward the plane; he can barely reach the tail, and the plane crashes.

 


Minnie lands softly beside him, but he pokes fun at her and the horseshoe she had given him for luck before he invited her aboard the plane. As she turns her back on him, he throws away the horseshoe-- which, naturally, boomerangs back to him.


 

The short ends on a defeated Mickey: his plane crashed, his girlfriend walked out, and he was hit by the horseshoe.


In the strip, however, Minnie's accidental fall ends the Plane Crazy plot: Mickey keeps flying, but gets lost.

Bridging both continuities (but possibly also part of Castaway's plot-- I have never seen it), the strip of January 23 shows the plane falling part, marking the end of the Plane Crazy sequence and leaving Mickey stranded, "Lost on a Desert Island".

 

 

Bibliography:
Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse in Color-- 1930s Disney Comic Strip Classics; Another Rainbow, 1988; articles by Geoffrey Blum & Thomas Andrae, and interview with Floyd Gottfredson by Disney Studio archivist David R. Smith
The Hand Behind the Mouse-- An intimate biography of Ub Iwerks, the man Walt Disney called "the greatest animator in the world"; Leslie Iwerks & John Kenworthy; Disney Editions, 2001
Mickey; Pierre Lambert, Démons & Merveilles, 1998

 

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