Don't Mess with Mickey Mouse

Some cultural icons just don't stand up to ridicule — or being otherwise messed with. Such is the case with Walt Disney's most famous creation, Mickey Mouse.

Seems the famous mouse is the star of a Wii game on the horizon titled Epic Mickey. Apparently, you can help the Mouse decide whether to help creation characters out of jams or make tough decisions, all in the virtual world of Wii.

This being an electronic game, you can also convince your avatar to do things that are either naughty or nice. And it's that word naughty that comes in handy now because word leaked out, from a variety sources (namely the ones who had seen for themselves), that the game's image of Mickey Mouse would morph into an image evocative of what the game-player had just ordered the game character to do. Have Mickey steal money or other things, and the result is an evil-looking Mickey.

That was a bridge too far to nearly everyone who saw the images, play-tested the game, or otherwise heard about this plan to show Mickey Mouse in a not-so-positive light. Many people didn't even want to know how Mickey would look differently. The point was, they wanted Mickey to look like Mickey, the same as he always has. When you're a cultural icon of those gigantic proportions, you tend to be recognizable. And more often than that, the people who have seen the evil-looking Mouse in Epic Mickey found themselves thinking something along the lines of "That's just plain wrong."

Such has been the outcry that the makers of the game have retouched Mickey, to bring him more in line with the traditional image, with the exception that if you do order him to do something bad, his character will appear to have smudges around the edges, which most people probably won't even notice. That's a far cry from Mickey breaking out into a maniacal grin or some such negative portrayal of the one Disney icon who seems always to be happy.

That's the point, really. Mickey is always happy, even when he's not. Mickey Mouse is an image that is so frozen in people's minds that messing with that image is similar to trivializing a religious figure or offending the proponents of a religion.

The lesson here? Don't mess with the Mouse.