The Gorilla Mystery

The Gorilla Mystery is a 1930 Mickey Mouse animated film produced by Walt Disney for Columbia Pictures, as part of the Mickey Mouse film series.[1] It was the twenty-second Mickey Mouse short to be produced, the seventh of that year.[2]

The Gorilla Mystery
Directed byBurt Gillett
Produced byWalt Disney
Animation byJohnny Cannon,
Les Clark,
Ben Sharpsteen,
Jack Cutting,
Jack King,
Dick Lundy,
Tom Palmer,
Wilfred Jackson,
Dave Hand,
Charlie Byrne,
Norm Ferguson
Color processBlack and white
Production
company
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
September 22, 1930[1]
Running time
7:27 min.
CountryUnited States

The short is a spoof of the 1925 play The Gorilla by Ralph Spence, which had been made into a 1927 silent film and a sound remake.[1]

Synopsis

Mickey Mouse reads in the newspaper that a gorilla has escaped from the zoo, and he calls Minnie to warn her. She's not afraid, and sings a song to Mickey over the phone. Then the gorilla breaks into her house and kidnaps her, and Mickey -- hearing her screams over the telephone -- rushes to save her. The gorilla takes Minnie upstairs to the attic and ties her up, then plays cat and mouse with Mickey. At the end, the gorilla trips over the rope, knocking him senseless. Mickey and Minnie dance to celebrate their narrow escape.

Production

While the gorilla in the short isn't named, it was retroactively identified as the same gorilla seen in the 1933 shorts Mickey's Mechanical Man and The Pet Store, named Beppo.[1]

The 1944 short Donald Duck and the Gorilla has a similar plot to this film, with a killer gorilla named Ajax escaping from the local zoo.

Reception

In Mickey's Movies: The Theatrical Films of Mickey Mouse, Gijs Grob observes, "The Gorilla Mystery is noteworthy for the extensive dialogue in the beginning. By now the Disney animators had mastered lip-sync, and neither Mickey nor Minnie show any awkward faces while talking. Even more interesting is the cartoon's elaborately drawn gorilla, which in several scenes is staged to show its huge size. The gorilla and the clever use of light and shadow make The Gorilla Mystery look more sophisticated than earlier Mickey Mouse cartoons. Even The Fire Fighters of only three months earlier starts to look primitive."[3]

Motion Picture News (Dec 6, 1930): "This is not up to the standard of other Mickey Mouse cartoons, but it is a good comedy, nevertheless. The telephone sequence is especially good."[4]

Voice cast
gollark: I don't really care very much either way. Also, "know too much"?
gollark: ... you know people can read the filenames right?
gollark: A better reason would be that it's not really ethical, but...
gollark: Says the anarchocommunist who talks about baseball bats constantly?
gollark: And most stuff will just mostly ignore it, so you need to get people to update the stored data somehow.

See also

References
  1. Kaufman, J.B.; Gerstein, David (2018). Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: The Ultimate History. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-5284-4.
  2. Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 108–109. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  3. Grob, Gijs (2018). "The Gorilla Mystery". Mickey's Movies: The Theatrical Films of Mickey Mouse. Theme Park Press. ISBN 1683901231.
  4. "Short Subjects". Motion Picture News: 121. December 6, 1930. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
  5. Hischak, Thomas S. (2011). Disney Voice Actors: A Biographical Dictionary. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0786462711.
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