Mickey has already been featured in no less than four boxed sets, five if you count his hosting duties on The Mickey Mouse Club TV show, in the popular label's exhaustive "Walt Disney Treasures" line, with more than a hundred shorts in both black and white and color out on DVD thus far. Classic Cartoon Favorites -- Volume 1-- Starring Mickey is a less pricey if not cost-effective alternative to these $32.99 SRP tins. Others in this budget-minded series include shorts featuring Donald Duck, Goofy, and Chip 'n Dale. These DVDs seemed designed specifically to serve two functions: 1) to whet the appetites of consumers who up to now have been on the fence about the pricier tins and, 2) like many a Disney video, to act as hour-long babysitters for squirrelly toddlers. In this sense Starring Mickey works just fine, though even casual buyers will be understandably puzzled by the selection and organization of the shorts.

Starring Mickey offers just seven eight-minute cartoons, all of which can be found elsewhere in Mickey Mouse in Living Color, with six of the shorts in Volume 1 (five of which are on Disc 1!) and one on Volume 2.

The seven cartoons, all originally in Technicolor, are: Mickey's Circus (1936), Mickey's Garden (1935), The Little Whirlwind (1941), On Ice (1935), Hawaiian Holiday (1937), Moving Day (1936), and Orphans' Picnic (1936).

The selection, to say the least, is baffling. No effort has been made, for instance, to present the shorts chronologically, offer a wider sampling of shorts covering Mickey's long career (e.g., start with Steamboat Willie, then Mickey's first color short, etc.), to present the best or most representative shorts, or even to compile those cartoons which provide Mickey his best showcases. In most of these shorts, Mickey plays straight man to the more featured antics of Donald Duck and Goofy. Mickey's Circus, for instance, is less about Mickey than Donald's frustrations with a baby seal.

There's also a sameness permeating the shorts. They follow a fairly rigid formula with the same sort of slapstick and situations distinguished only by their settings and sometimes technically impressive and well-drawn animation. The episodic Hawaiian Holiday is probably the funniest of the bunch, with good sight gags as Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy enjoy a day at the beach. More interesting for its slight unusualness is Moving Day, whose story finds Mickey, Donald and Goofy on the verge of repossession and eviction after not paying their rent for six months. It must have clicked with Depression era audiences.

Part of the problem is Mickey himself, as a character. Very much the creation of late-silent era animation, he's a lot closer in spirit to Felix the Cat or Bosko than later (and more evolving) creations like Bugs Bunny and Popeye. Mickey was fine in the barnyard, playing a pig's nipples like a xylophone and the recipient of endless kicks in the pants, but as Disney upped the ante and made his cartoons more technically ambitions with subtler character expressions, it's no wonder artists and audiences were, ahem, drawn away from Mickey and to the character possibilities of Donald and Goofy.

"It all started with a mouse," Disney liked to say, and over time Mickey came to represent Disney's idea of the everyday American, sometimes clumsy but cherry and determined, honest and sincere, and able to laugh at his little set-backs. Disney saw himself in Mickey, and it's no surprise that he provided Mickey's voice for many years.

Technically the shorts are ambitious but less so than Disney's better-regarded Silly Symphonies, and once the studio branched out into feature animation the shorts became much more a meat and potatoes operation, designed to fill out programs and sell merchandise.

Video & Audio

Presented in full-frame format, the shorts all look extremely good for their age, often with knockout color and uniformly clean English-only mono sound. (Hard-of-hearing subtitles are provided.) A small complaint is that all but one of these shorts have altered or missing titles cards that delete acknowledgement of the original distributor (UA, RKO, etc.).

Extra Features

There are no supplements at all, just promos for other Disney titles. Of special note is the DVD's menu screen music, headache-inducing carnival midway-esque razzamatazz that out-annoys Universal's menus on its "Western Classics" line.

Parting Thoughts

Parents looking to subdue screaming kids will find Starring Mickey a handy DVD to keep around the house, but anyone with more than a passing interest in the character is advised to rent or purchase the Walt Disney Treasures titles instead.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.