The Mickey Mouse Revue
1971 - 1980 (at Tokyo Disneyland since 1983)

"Join us for the latest colossal in Mickey's illustrious career..."
Narrator in The Mickey Mouse Revue's Pre-show Film 

   The Mickey Mouse Revue was one of the initial attractions conceived by WED Enterprises to become a Walt Disney World "first."  It was also the first major Magic Kingdom attraction to leave the park.  This show anchored the western portion of Fantasyland's main courtyard, in the theater that housed Legend of the Lion King for several years (and this year becomes the home of Mickey's Philharmagic, a show that draws from the original show's base concept.) The Mickey Mouse Revue played to guests for almost nine years in Florida before it was dismantled and shipped to Tokyo Disneyland for an April 1983 opening.

   The idea for the attraction carries back to Walt Disney himself, who described such a show during a 1962 interview.  When discussing his new audio-animatronic process and its applications in The Enchanted Tiki Room and an as-yet untitled haunted house attraction, Walt said he had similar plans for "all the Disney characters."

   "I have in mind a theater," he said, "and the figures will not only put on the show but be sitting in the boxes with the visitors, heckling. I don't know just when I'll do that."

   "Just when" turned out to be October, 1971 for Walt's successors. While the show didn't end up with programmed hecklers, it did provide a fantastic venue for 73 Disney characters with musical inclinations. Those characters were represented by 81 separate animated figures (8 of whom were alternate versions that appeared in different onstage locations.)  

   In the attraction's holding area, which was appointed in hues of rose and pink, the walls were lined with trompe l'oeil paintings of Mickey (and one with Minnie also) in costumes from several of his more famous roles, from Steamboat Willie to the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia. Guests waited here before a host or hostess signaled that it was time to enter the pre-show theater. At that time, they were ushered through a small portal on the east wall and into a room lined with several tiers of viewing platforms separated by lean rails which, as you must know, will not support your weight nor the weight of your children so for chrissakes please don't sit on them.

   The pre-show was an eight minute film that traced Mickey's career and the use of sound in his films. The first portion of the film was narrated by an animated sound track that wiggled and jumped its way across the screen in time with the sounds it was making (an effect similar to one used in Disney's The Three Caballeros, in 1945, where Donald Duck gets mixed up in the sound track of a crazy Latin song.) At the end of the pre-show film, the focus was shifted to Mickey's role as host in the theme parks. The final scene was live action footage of Disney characters pouring out through the front of the castle to a jazzed-up version (i.e., with a freaky bass guitar riff that typified most of Disney's early 1970s attempts to prove its hipness to the "younger generation" while simultaneously trying to demonstrate via cheesy Kurt Russell films that boys need not have shoulder-length hair to get the girls) of the Mickey Mouse March. Mickey came to the front of the scene and urged guests to follow him along into the theater on their right. "Come along folks, it's time for the Mickey Mouse Musical Revue!"*

  Then guests entered the main theater through one of several pink automatic doors on their right.  The cavernous room contained thirteen rows of seats facing an 86-foot long stage.  The proscenium was draped with a huge red curtain and flanked by two smaller stages resembling box seats.  In the center of the curtain were the traditional theater icons, the comedy and tragedy masks - traditional aside from the similarities to Mickey, as both masks had mouse ears.

   Once everyone was seated, a host or hostess got on the house mike and reminded everyone not to eat, drink, smoke or use flash bulbs during the show.  The room grew dark and the sound of an unseen orchestra tuning their instruments filled the room while the curtains separated and were pulled back toward the wings. In the center of the stage, the shadow of Mickey appeared against a secondary curtain.  Then Mickey came into view on his bright red pedestal as it rose from the pit. The orchestra soon rose around him.

   Spread out across 35 feet of the stage area, the orchestra's members, numbering 23, ranged from cartoon short stars such as Minnie, Goofy, Daisy and Pluto to earlier feature film personalities like Dumbo, Timothy Mouse, the Mad Hatter, March Hare, the Dormouse, Gus and Jaq all the way up to more recent (for 1971) film performers like Baloo, Kaa, King Louie, Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit.  Their instruments were varied: tubas, tympani and trumpets, ukuleles, kazoos and clarinets.  Kaa played his own tail like a flute, which still seems as absolutely strange to me now as it did when I was six.
 

     The orchestra played a medley of familiar Disney tunes, starting with "Heigh Ho," then moving on to "Whistle While You Work," "When You Wish Upon A Star" and "Hi Diddle Dee Dee."

   At the conclusion of that brief overture, Dumbo's tuba intoned the first few notes of "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf" as the wolf's shadow snuck across the rear curtain toward center stage.  Further right a section of the curtain rose to reveal the Three Little Pigs in a cross-section of Practical Pig's brick house.  The pigs played and sang a few seconds of their signature song before the curtain closed over them and another section lifted to the left.

   The next vignette featured Snow White and some forest animals sitting on a wooded hillside.  She sang a version of "I'm Wishing," the same version that emanated from Snow White's Adventure's wishing well at WDW until 1994, while the animals listened in. As Snow White finished, an adjacent area of the hillside came into view from behind another section of rising curtain. Here the Seven Dwarfs stood in their cottage, playing "The Silly Song." The molds from which these dwarfs were cast were reused many years later to create the dwarfs that now inhabit the cottage scenes in both Disneyland and WDW's revamped Snow White rides, as well those in Disneyland Paris and Tokyo Disneyland...making the latter park home to two complete sets of dwarfs. In the Mickey Mouse Revue, the dwarfs sang part of the song with Snow White's help before the curtain lowered on their setting.

   To the far right end of the stage the curtain rose on a scene from Alice In Wonderland, with Alice standing in the midst of fifteen oversized flowers.  As Alice and the flowers swayed in time, she sang part of "All In The Golden Afternoon."  Alice's stage voice, like that of many other characters in this production, was a marked departure from her film voice.  Much like the Darlene Gillespie version that plays in Disneyland's Storybook Land, this Alice sounded more mature and polished than did a young Kathryn Beaumont. This scene was the best in the show visually; every last piece of it looked like it was crafted of confectioner's sugar and the colors popped like fireworks.

   The next scene was from "The Three Caballeros," and it was the show's most animated and comical segment. As soon as Alice's song drew to a close, a flying carpet rose from the pit to the left of the orchestra.  On the carpet were Donald, Panchito and Jose Carioca. They broke out into the main theme from "Three Caballeros" in a blaze of music and color, with Donald on maracas, Jose on guitar and Panchito firing two pistols.  Each shot sent sparks of bright light streaking across the room.

   The three had barely begun their song when the lights went out on the carpet.  Instantaneously, Panchito and Jose appeared (still singing) on the small side stage to the audience's right.  Then Panchito fired a pistol and the glow of his bullet raced across the stage, illuminating Donald on the left side stage. Donald shook his maracas vigorously and continued the song like the frantic duck he is. With the sound of another ricocheting bullet, he disappeared and reappeared on the right side stage. Another shot and Panchito and Jose popped up where Donald had been just seconds prior.

   Moments later the three were reunited on the carpet, where they quickly finished the song and disappeared as quickly as they'd arrived. This was definitely a highlight of the show. The sight of Donald wiggling around so fast (in three dimensions, no less) was absolutely infectious.

   The next vignette began with the Fairy Godmother and Cinderella, in her scullery maid outfit, standing at the far left side of the stage. The Fairy Godmother sang "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" and waved her wand around. Soon, in a shower of twinkling lights, Cinderella was transformed into her princess incarnation. Then the rear curtain lowered as a projection of Cinderella and Prince Charming, as silhouettes, danced across it in a spotlight. They sang "So This Is Love" as they waltzed. Clusters of hearts framed them on the curtain. And, yes, this was the most boring part of the show.

   When the projection faded out, the sound of the orchestra came rising up from the pit. To the right, Brer Fox, Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit rose into view and began singing "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah." Fans of Splash Mountain and Song of the South might wonder how it came to pass that these three resolved to put aside their longstanding homicidal feuding and join each other onstage in song...but remember, Kaa played his tail like a flute! As they sang, the orchestra rose beside them. The Three Caballeros reappeared also, and then the rear curtain lifted to reveal all of the show's scenes at once. The houses of the Three Little Pigs and Seven Dwarfs were gone, leaving all the characters contrasted against a brightening sky in the background. Cinderella now stood with Prince Charming, and everyone joined in the song.  A rainbow gleamed across the horizon as the voices and instruments of all the characters reached a crescendo.

   At the close of the song, the entire stage fell dark save for a spotlight on Mickey.  His pedestal spun to face the audience as the other characters sang the "Mickey Mouse Club Alma Mater." Mickey, all choked up, spoke. "Well folks, that concludes our show, we hope you enjoyed it..." Then, as he let out a little mouse laugh, the main curtain was drawn and the show was over.

   The total show time came out to only 9 minutes 30 seconds, which made it a relatively short Disney stage production. Yet it used far more characters than any of its predecessors or 1971 counterparts.

    The specifics of why the Revue was removed from Florida are not well documented, but it's fairly easy to connect the dots. For one thing, the show opened in 1971 as an "E" ticket attraction, denoting that the company anticipated it to be a top draw...just like the Country Bear Jamboree in Frontierland. But whereas the Country Bear show was so popular that its queue required the closure of a gift shop to keep the line out of the street (see Westward Ho,) the Mouse Revue seldom drew a comparable crowd. In 1973 it was downgraded to a "D" ticket - an extremely rare occurrence. It continued to pull an audience, but never gained the prominence that had been expected for it. Secondly, when representatives of the Oriental Land Co. began touring Disneyland and WDW in the 1970s and choosing the attractions that would comprise their new Tokyo Disneyland park, the Mickey Mouse Revue made their list. Of course, the least expensive means of achieving that would be to send the original overseas. For whatever combination of mitigating factors existed, its exodus ultimately turned out to be an acceptable concession; it was the only attraction at either Disneyland or WDW that was shipped to, rather than replicated for, Tokyo.

   In Tokyo, the Mickey Mouse Revue plays almost identically to its staging in Florida.  The beautiful holding area art was faithfully reproduced, the pre-show film footage is the same except for the final live-action segment and the show scenes run in the same order with the same music.  The largest difference is that the voices are recorded in Japanese - which actually makes it more entertaining. There are some minor changes in the set colors and a handful of modifications to the characters themselves (Kaa's eyes are in slightly more of a hypnotic trance mode in Japan than in Florida, but he's still playing his tail.)

   I was eleven when the show closed in Florida. At the time, local media coverage was mostly focused on the impending debut of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad later that year. My attention was on the same thing. By 1988, however, the absence of the Mickey Mouse Revue and other early Magic Kingdom attractions (coupled with the addition of new areas along the qualitative lines of "Mickey's Birthdayland") was turning the park into a starkly different place than it had been ten years prior. So the Mouse Revue's departure could accurately be described as the beginning of the end of the beginning.

   Immediately after the show closed, its home was renamed the Fantasyland Theater. As such it served as a venue for continuous looping Disney cartoons (a cool, uncramped hideout for guests seeking a respite from the Florida heat,) and also housed occasional employee film festival events. In 1988, the 3-D film Magic Journeys opened in the theater - after being bumped out of Epcot's Magic Eye Theater to make room for Captain EO in 1986. At that time the pre-show was a 3-D Donald Duck cartoon called "Working For Peanuts." In 1993, Magic Journeys came out to make room for a new production, the Legend of the Lion King. That show, which made use of life-size puppets to tell the story from the film, opened in July 1994 and ran until 2002. Now the same theater is on the cusp of reopening with a new show that apparently hails back to the original concept: Mickey Mouse conducting an orchestral performance of well-known songs from Disney films. The new show is rumored to be a 3-D film with in-theater effects, similar to Muppetvision 3D at the Disney-MGM Studios park. If you're the hopeful sort, hope that none of the people responsible for the revamped Enchanted Tiki Room show were allowed within a mile of this new effort.

   I'll keep saving for my plane ticket to Tokyo.

   * The working title for the attraction was The Mickey Mouse Musical Revue prior to its opening. The pre-show film had evidently been shot and overdubbed before the final name was decided upon.