Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

The advertising soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Mickey’s success shot into the stratosphere as fast as Felix’s had a decade earlier. From the beginning, people recognized and theorized about Mickey’s unique connection to audiences. Dr. A. A. Brill, the first translator of Freud into English, told Photoplay that Mickey “narcotized” adults by returning them to a childhood where “everything could still be attained through fantasy.” Another analysis claimed that Mickey’s round design suggested a kind of impregnability that made him a “perfect expression of what he symbolizes—survival.” The Saturday Review of Literature suggested that Mickey tapped into the id of a jittery new machine age: “The jerky rhythm of his movements, the constant collisions, explosions, and projections, are symbolic of nervous modern man living in a whirl of mechanical forces.” Progress Today even granted Mickey a kind of religious status, calling him “St. Francis of the Silver Screen.”

      Disney had a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon on his hands but didn’t get swept up in all the analysis. He seemed to intuitively understand that academic noodling would kill the magic, so he kept his answers simple and plain. When no less a writer than Aldous Huxley asked him to elaborate on Mickey’s theoretical underpinnings, he threw up his hands and shrugged. “We just make a Mickey, and then the profs come along and tell us what we got.”