Jim looks at a rebranding campaign Disney tried in the 1990s.
In 1993-1994 the Walt Disney Company launched an extensive branding campaign called "The Perils of Mickey" inspired by vintage Floyd Gottfredson comic strip art and stories from the 1930s.
The phrase, of course, was meant to reference "The Perils of Pauline", the iconic cliffhanging silent movie serial where the heroine is constantly menaced by a variety of villains and dangers but escaping at the last minute. Its formula inspired other similar films, television commercials, animated cartoons and much more.
The main iconic image for the series was Mickey Mouse swinging on a rope over a pit of hungry green alligators with their mouths wide open that certainly referenced a sense of impending peril.
In a 1979 interview, cartoonist Gottfredson told me about the comic strip sequence that originally ran in late 1932/early 1933 that inspired that striking image, "There was one sequence where Mickey grabs a pole and vaults over this alligator pit but as he is leaping, the pole breaks. King Features sent us a frantic telegram that they were going to cut out the entire sequence because the alligators would upset women and children reading the newspaper. I took the photostats to Walt and he just laughed. He thought it was a good adventure and was confident that we had a way of making the resolution of the peril humorous. So he contacted the syndicate and they left it in."
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