As this article in The New York Times notes, the Disney organization is struggling to make Mickey Mouse as popular as…well, as popular as Mickey Mouse oughta be. There are a couple of obvious reasons why he isn't, one being that his best work is being hidden. The Disney Channel and Toon Disney rarely feature the classic Mickey cartoons, and the home video releases have been more slanted to the collector market. The comic strips are gone and the comic books are sparse in their availability and tend to treat Donald and Scrooge as the superstars. Yes, Mickey presides over Disneyland and Disney World and is well-represented therein…but only because he has the job. He's increasingly becoming like one of those faux celebrities who is famous only for being famous. You wake up one morning and folks are insisting on his greatness but you never get to see it; ergo, you never fully accept it. So how is a kid to fall in love with The Mouse? And when Mickey's classic adventures are accessible, do they not seem a bit grounded in an earlier, unfamiliar era?
Those are good questions and the solution obviously has to do with generating great new Mickey adventures in several venues. But this brings us to a major stumbling block that inevitably diminishes every great character that is controlled by a corporation: Too Many Bosses. If you were to roam through the Disney organization, you'd find hundreds, maybe thousands of folks who have some sort of "executive" position and what they think is a clear take on what to do with Mickey. They're not all wrong but they're not all right in the same way. Which creates massive gridlock and unhappy compromises since they won't concede to having no say in Disney's signature asset. Not long ago at another big corporation which shall remain nameless (it was Time-Warner), I had a meeting with a mid-level exec who at that moment had nothing to do with Bugs Bunny…and boy, was she pissed. The lady had every intention of rising up in the Time-Warner hierarchy to better jobs with bigger salaries, and that meant she had to get some control over The Wabbit and his immediate cohorts. It was demeaning that she was excluded from Bugs projects, just as I gather it's demeaning in a non-entertainment company situation if you don't get to eat in the Executive Dining Room or tinkle in the Executive Washroom. Don't think that kind of thing doesn't happen in any corporate situation, and Disney is no exception.
Ideally, what Disney needs to do is to find one cartoonist or one small group and appoint them to be Mickey Dictators. Give them the power to define Mickey anew and to say no to anything that involves Mickey the way Walt once could…and did. But no one high up in Disney is about to exclude themselves from such decisions. This has always been true but it's truer now than ever. Once upon a time, people who went to work for a company like that envisioned long careers, staying there forever, if possible. The business has changed. Now, the mindset is that everyone's a temp, and you want to get as much as you can for as long as it lasts. That means rising up quickly in the company and not caring a lot about the long-term health of its properties, which leads to something as symbolic as Mickey Mouse being caught in umpteen tugs-of-war. Every office, every division wants a piece of Mickey, which means that key decisions are made, if they're made at all, by committee. With a committee, it may go in as a Mouse or a Duck or a Wabbit, but when it comes out, it's always The Camel. One of the main things that made Walt Disney as successful as he was was that he didn't have to fight anyone to prove he was in charge. And of course, he expected to be with the company for the rest of his life.