Thunderbean Mickey

I bet you never thought you'd live to see the day Steve Staunchfield would give us a Mickey Mouse set. But yes, Virginia, there is one, and it'll be here very soon. In fact, it's all ready for preorder on Thunderbean's website. It is called Public Domain Mouse Adventures.

There is no cover yet, but there is supposed to be one of those "reversible" ones, and all they have is this pencilled preview:

This is the full size of the picture, but it looks like cropped on the left is Mickey giving us the finger! This guy actually looks a lot like Mickey Rat:

It includes the three 1928 PD shorts (Plane Crazy, Steamboat Willie and Gallopin' Gaucho), plus other mouse 'toons, presumably those awful Van Beuren Aesop's Fables with phony Mickeys and Minnies. I already have all of the Mickey Mouse Walt Disney Treasures, so I'm probably not after this set that much.

What has confused me most is that--supposedly--the infamous unauthorized short Uncle Walt is included. This cannot be, because it is lost, unless they found it and nobody knew. If you're curious, it's one of those "hippies hate Disney" things, attacking him for "scaring kids". It must've been confused with Mickey Mouse in Vietnam, a badly-made and unfunny short from the Sixties that has dated--albeit dramatically (I will cover it in a future post.) 

I don't know when it will come out, but given I covered a Harman-Ising collection back in October, and it still isn't out, it'll be some time. Plus, I get the impression from Staunchfield that this has just started, since he has not mentioned it in recent Cartoon Research articles. This is understandable; restoring every frame sounds unfathomable to lazy me.

But for now, stick around for further adventures in the slow disintegration of Mickey Mouse.