"A Mickey Mouse Cartoon"

Release Date March 17, 1931

Running Time 7:23

Synopsis

Mickey's a taxi driver on a very dilapidated road. He tries to take Percy Pig to an appointment, but loses him on the way. He then tries to bring Minnie to her music lesson, but a detour through a barnyard and an encounter with a snake-oil salesman ruin that plan, too.

Characters

Mickey Mouse

Minnie Mouse

Credits

Director : Bert Gillett

Television

Mickey's Mouse Tracks : Episode #73

DVD

Disney Treasures : Mickey Mouse in Black and White Volume 2

Technical Specifications

Color Type : Black and White

Animation type : Standard

Sound mix : Mono

Aspect ration : 1.33 : 1

Negative format : 35mm

Print format : 35mm

Cinematographic process : Spherical

Original language : English

Released by Columbia Pictures

Gallery

Click on the thumbnail for the full-sized picture

Comments

This short was inspired by Walt Disney's own rough taxi ride one day.

From Jerry Edwards : Mickey is a reckless taxi driver who has a series of hilarious adventures involving out-of-control traffic, a flat tire, a phony patent-medicine man, and a collision with a cow and barn. It appears that part of the idea for this cartoon came from Walt Disney's unhappy encounter with a traffic cop. One fun gag is Mickey being thrilled as each new bump causes his taxi meter to jump up several dollars each time. His luck turns bad when the last bump causes the meter to reset to zero. I find it rather "odd" that Pete appears as two different characters in this short. Pete, with normal legs, appears early in the short as the traffic cop who reads Mickey the riot act for causing a traffic jam. Later Pete appears (with a peg leg) as the phony patent-medicine salesman.

From Ryan : This is definitely a classic Disney cartoon. Mickey is a taxi driver who drives a somewhat odd-looking taxi (or maybe that's just how they appeared back then). It was funny seeing the meter move from a few cents as far up to $7.50 (which was pretty damn expensive for a taxi ride back then). Another scene that I should point out in this short was where Mickey is driving Minnie to her music lesson, he runs into a cow and the cow ends up with the top of the cab (where the driver/passengers ride) on her back. The license plate had a bunch of numbers on it and when the cow turned it around by running, it read "OH HECK."

From Bill : This is a great short; it has gags and action galore! It opens with Mickey driving his somewhat anthropomorphic taxi down the street, jumping around looking for fares and being squeezed between two other cabs. Pete, who is a cop, yells at Mickey for causing a traffic jam picking up a fare. From then it's one gag after another. Mickey's cab passing another small car by all four wheels scissoring up and going over the car; classic stuff. And Mickey's cab pushing two other cars away to park, biting the front car and Mickey telling the car "No, no!" This short also had Pete in the role of a snake oil salesman, complete with pegleg. The best gag was when the cab strikes a rock and the cab flies off it's chassis and lands on Clarabelle Cow's back. This is when Mickey was a wild and daring mouse and shows why he was the king in the early days. They should have never changed his demeanor!

Referenced Comments

Steamboat Willie (1928)

(The following is excerpted from an interview with Dave Hand posted on Michael Barrier.com and is reprinted here with the authors permission. Copyright 2003 by Michael Barrier.)

I well remember at this time that I had a particular Mickey Mouse taxicab scene to do [for Traffic Troubles, 1931], and I did my very best with it—as I of course would—and got it on the Movieola with Walt, and he squinted and squirmed and grunted, and said, no, it didn’t have enough exaggerated action to it. I said OK, and back I went to my desk. Five times I brought that corrected scene to him, and each time I made it more exaggerated, and each time he turned it down. I thought, "What does this crazy man want?" I’d been in the business eleven years then, and Walt had much less time in the business—I never thought of that, though, I never thought that he didn’t know as much as I, I never thought that, I just thought that he ought to know that this animation of mine is acceptable, that was all. So, the fifth time I went back to my desk, and again, making all the in-betweens, and the drawings cleaned up nicely, and had it tested—I went back this time, happy that at last Walt would approve it. He looked at it, shook his head and walked away. I was broken up! It wasn’t right that I should have to do it that often.

Finally, I thought, "I’m going to show Walt he can’t be that smart with me"—I’m a year older than him, and even though that didn’t matter, it was just that he wasn’t an older man—I said to myself, "I’m going to show that fellow a trick or two." So went back to my desk to redo this scene a sixth time, and I said, "I’m going to make this thing so extreme, so outlandish, so crazy, that he’ll say, "Well, Dave, I didn’t mean to exaggerate it that much." So I did, I was really dirty—the only time I remember being dirty with Walt—and I made that thing so outlandish, and so extreme, I was ashamed of what I had done. But I brought the new test in very self-righteously and put it on for Walt, and said, "All right, Walt, I did this thing over again, I hope it’s OK," while slyly watching for him to explode—fly off the handle. He put his foot on the pedal, and he started the loop around and around and around, looking at it and looking at it. Then he stopped the loop and looked up at me with a big smile and said, "There! You’ve got it! Why didn’t you do it that way in the first place?"

That lesson stuck with me as I progressed through the studio, into supervising animator and then director. A supervising animator had three or four juniors, and he would take a small section of the picture, or a third of the picture, from the director and farm it out to his juniors, and he would work with them to show them how to get what he was supposed to be able to get. That was a part of the development of the animator in the studio in the early days, and continued, juniors working under seniors, and seniors being responsible for juniors. The lazier the senior was, the more the junior got to do, because the senior would sit and read books and make the junior do the job properly, and that’s how the junior learned so well.

So that lesson about exaggeration stayed with me through the supervising animation to the direction, and the supervising director that I eventually became. I never forgot that, and I think it might have shown up a little bit in my working with Walt—what he wanted, I suppose I could convey to an animator.