The Strange Tale of Get A Horse!
The story behind the 1980 Disney animated feature
The Secret of NIMH is certainly an interesting tale. But nothing is more intriguing than the history behind its accompanying cartoon, the Mickey Mouse short
Get A Horse!
The roots of
Get A Horse! can be easily traced, found in the 1978 Disney classic
Mickey Mousecapade and its
Steamboat Willie remake. Don Bluth's animation team had been entrusted the task of creating a new Mickey Mouse movie for the rodent's golden anniversary, no easy matter with Walt Disney breathing down their necks. The film went through many, many, many revisions, with new ideas being thrown in and out left and right. One entertaining but ultimately unimportant segment that was thrown out while storyboarding was some farm hijinx, where Mickey and his horse, Tanglefoot, got into all sorts of funny situations. Scrapped for time, the segment found new life when Bluth decided he wanted another Mickey cartoon to come before Disney's next movie.
Drawing from inspirations such as
Mickey's Polo Team (1936) and the ever-ubiquitous Floyd Gottfredson comic strips, Don Bluth successfully crafted the first new Mickey Mouse cartoon since 1953, and the mouse's first solo outing since
Thru the Mirror in 1936. None of his pals showed up, not Minnie, not Donald, nor Goofy or Pluto. Mickey and Tanglefoot, his ornery, annoying, and dumb speckled equine companion, faced off against Pegleg Pete in a horse race of epic proportions, with cheating abound. When Walt was shown the near-completed cartoon, Bluth said that he "just laughed his ass off, and congratulated me on recapturing the spirit of Mickey."
Walt was so enthralled by
Get A Horse! that he decided to have the cartoon run in front of all of his films out at the time, sans
Mickey Mousecapade, which already had
Steamboat Willie playing in advance. Running a Disney cartoon before
Raiders of the Lost Ark seemed a little tone-deaf, but proved not to be, in the long run. Together, the two Mickey cartoons and the animated film unleashed upon the world a new era of Mickey-mania unseen since the '30s. Mickey merchandising, despite its seemingly unending flow, eventually ran out of stock nationwide. A
Steamboat Willie-costumed Mickey Mouse doll became the hottest toy of the year, breaking all records and selling out by Thanksgiving. When Black Friday 1980 kicked in, more than a few injuries were sustained by bargain-hunting parents searching for the plushie. Box office revenues for
Mickey Mousecapade received a second wind, as America and the world's children flooded movie theaters to see Disney's icon on the big screen--again.
Get A Horse!'s success cemented the revival of the squash-and-stretch classic methods of cartooning as the only way to go about children's animation in the decade. While Universal was knee-deep in adapting Thumbelina, other film studios began looking in their grab bags of old cartoons to revive interest in. MGM, on the verge of splitting in half, threw themselves headfirst into resurrecting Tom and Jerry. Paramount's Famous Studios summoned Casper the Friendly Ghost back from beyond the grave. And Warner Brothers began to seriously consider buckling down and returning Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Looney Toons gang back to the limelight. But none could or would ever compare to Walt Disney's greatest creation, Mister Cartoon himself, Mickey Mouse.
