If you grew up watching Disney’s animated shorts - either on VHS, in endless Disney Channel marathons, or as they originally appeared in theaters because you’re impossibly old - Disney+ has got just the thing for you. The streaming service just dropped a trailer for The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, a brand new collection of shorts starring the titular brand ambassador coming later this month.
The trailer promises a slew of new seven-minute adventures starring Mickey and his iconic pals, including Donald Duck, Goofy, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, and Daisy Duck. (That said, Donald is not given any lines in this trailer, and I will not stand for this Donald Duck erasure.) If you’re familiar with the classic Mickey Mouse shorts, the stuff featured here will be warmly familiar, including far-out concepts like Mickey and friends as rustlers in the Old West as well as totally mundane things such as the gang trying to shop for a barbecue. This speaks to me as a kid who grew up with tons of the old shorts on VHS, because my two favorite classic Mickey Mouse adventures are Lonesome Ghosts (Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are ghostbusters in a haunted house) and Moving Day (Mickey and Donald are two roommates scrambling to move their belongings after being evicted, and Goofy is a delivery man who shows up and just decides to help them out for no clear reason). The mix of both fantastic and everyday settings featured in the trailer definitely piqued my interest.
However, there’s something that feels a little off about The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse. Firstly, the animation style is flat and dull (which was a gripe I also had with the otherwise enjoyable DuckTales reboot). One of my favorite things about the classic shorts was the richness and detail of the cell animation, and everything here looks heavily stylized and a little cheap. And secondly, the trailer focuses almost entirely on Mickey, and I’m not quite sure how to say this, but Mickey is kind of boring. He was always the least interesting member of the trio, the cheerful straight man to Donald’s manic bouts of anger and Goofy’s catastrophic buffoonery. Casting him as a wily Bugs Bunny type doesn’t quite feel right. But hey, new Mickey Mouse shorts are new Mickey Mouse shorts, and this new batch looks like a ton of fun. I’m absolutely going to watch every single one of these when they hit Disney+ November 18.
Check out the trailer below. For more Disney+ wackiness, click here to read about why Baby Yoda needs to calm the flip down after last week’s episode of The Mandalorian.