Jim Korkis sends the following to add to his earlier comments about the Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland. It's long, but I think it's worth the space…
I checked my notes at the office this morning and here is a brief background on Disney costume characters. I was wrong about Mickey's puffy shoes. They came in 1963 not 1968 but up until that time, he was in just regular-sized black shoes.
In 1955, Mickey became the official host at Disneyland but since Walt had financial challenges, he couldn't afford to build character costumes. He borrowed them from John Harris's Ice Capades which was then touring with a segment of "Peter Pan." (Ice Capades had featured a Disney segment since 1948 with "Snow White.") That's why the costumes look so horrendous. They were made for ice skating so needed to be light and have a lot of vision.
In 1961, Animator Bill Justice (who did lots of animation on Donald Duck and Chip 'n' Dale) was brought in to design the costuming and make them more in proportion and to look more like the animated characters. Bill did the parade costume designs for characters like the marching soldiers from Babes in Toyland and the reindeer with the tongues hanging out as well as many others from 1961-1979. Bill designed 130 character costumes over the years.
Bill designed the first good Donald costume. He found a guy who was 4'6" and photographed him from all angles, blew up photos to full size, put tracing paper over the photos and designed the Donald Duck costume. The guy saw all the work involved and wanted $200 each time he put costume on, so they got someone else. That's one of the reasons characters are now designated by height rather than by a particular performer.
The early sixties showed a brief revision of some costumes for characters like Mickey who became shorter, fatter and with a tremendously oversized head. That lasted less than a year and settled into the "look" we know today, although for a while, Mickey wore a top hat and a huge bow tie ribbon around his neck and later just a huge bow tie to again try and play with the concept of size. Mickey got the puffy shoes in 1963 and Minnie got a satin dress in 1973. For the 50th anniversary in 1978, Minnie got the polka dot dress.
Over the years, many experiments were done with the character costumes. Disney briefly experimented with air conditioning on advice from the Kennedy Space Center but it added weight and couldn't be hidden in the odd shape and design of most characters. They experimented with tape players inside the costumes — Br'er Bear singing "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," Mickey with approximately six phrases — "How are you?" and "What's your name?" for instance. But characters have to be international and the limit of phrases also limited interaction. In 1996, they experimented with new tiny video cameras as small as a ball point pen. The cast member wore glasses to show the camera's view on the lens.
Abby Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, once told me this story about an experience she had as a child at Disneyland: "Just outside the employee's parking lot, there was a little cafeteria for the employees. I looked over and saw Mickey having a cup of coffee with Snow White. His head was on the table and he was smoking a big cigar. He was very short and old and had this gravelly deep voice. He came over to my grandmother and gave her a big hug. "Edna! Edna! Glad to see ya!" That's how I remember Mickey Mouse. He's emblazoned on my brain that way."
Great story and info, Jim. There's probably a whole book to be written about those costumes. The cast members I've encountered all have had incredible tales to tell, plus I don't think many people know about the programs where Disney exec-types dress in the costumes and wander the park for a little while on the theory it will give them some new understanding of what Disney is all about. Someone will do that book.