How old is this short? It’s so old that it falls exactly in the gap between the creation of the word “robot” and its common use in English. As in, the short is not called “Mickey’s Robot” because the audience generally would not have known what that title even meant. And that’s assuming director Wilfred Jackson knew what that word meant. Or Walt, or anyone else involved with the making of the short. These days, I don’t think anyone much knows that. It’s the sort of thing you have to look up, or else you find yourself saying, “Huh.” It seems I’m going to be delivering facts like that associated with Mickey Mouse these days.

For reasons I cannot hope to explain inasmuch as they would require understanding them myself, Mickey has built the eponymous mechanical man in order to fight a boxing match with Beppo the Gorilla. As you do, I guess. Anyway, Mickey is training the robot to fight when he is interrupted by Minnie, whose car horn drives the robot wild. Eventually, they go to take the robot to fight Beppo. Who promptly wipes the mat with him, of course, until Mickey and Minnie find a new technique and the robot remembers I guess that he can fight dirty.

Actually, the robot’s name is Champ. It does seem awfully presumptuous. I mean, we all know that the robot’s going to win, because Mickey’s. Sure, fine. But in-universe, there’s no reason to assume that. Naming your robot “champ” seems incredibly arrogant to me, if you’re just some schlub making a robot in your garage. For all your robot-fighting goals, which means that Hiro of Big Hero 6 at least has an interesting Disney pedigree.

Even though the basic plot here makes considerably less sense than Hiro’s bot-fighting. The poster we open on suggests that this is the contest between machine and beast, but do we actually need that particular contest? We know that machines are generally more efficient, but is there some sort of need to know whether robots can out-box gorillas? Why are we making gorillas box in the first place? I know kangaroo boxing turns out to be a thing, and I know people find gorillas scary—Beppo actually did three Mickey cartoons in this era—but “I am scared of it” and “it can box” are not reliably the same thing.

Also, though, there is a moment in this cartoon that is some of the most emotive I think Mickey’s ever been. After Beppo initially proves a more successful fighter than Champ, and Champ has been knocked to the canvas, Mickey is weeping over him. There are gears everywhere—it’s genuinely surprising that Champ still works after all the bits of him that get shed over the course of the cartoon. But Mickey looks more upset here than I think he does in a considerably later short where he thinks Pluto’s been shot. This is realistic grief, and it’s unsettling.

I also have to say I’m pretty sure the version of this I’ve seen is cropped all to hell and gone in the ever-popular “Disney won’t notice my YouTube copyright violation if I do this” style. Because it’s not on Disney+ yet, and the purging of the shorts from YouTube has clearly weeded out a lot of the better-quality versions. In order to see some of these shorts, I have to poke around until I find one that hasn’t been dubbed into some language I don’t speak. I really wish Disney would just freakin’ pick one of those and not take away every method of watching these things.

Help me afford what I can legally see by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!