There are a lot of illicit copies of Disney shorts available on YouTube. On the one hand, I’m sure Disney would very much like that not to be true. On the other hand, this means that my kids are getting the chance to see the same cartoons I grew up on in the golden days of the Disney Channel. Which also means that I watch some of them and think, “Was I aware when I was a kid how deeply weird this cartoon was?” Because some of these cartoons come from a very odd place.
The copyright date on this is 1950, though it’s listed as a 1951 cartoon. Anyway, Mickey and Pluto are on an outdoor trip to a resort called “Utopia,” which appears to be in the California redwoods. However, Mickey rather foolishly did not read the cabin rules before booking a trip; dogs are not allowed in the cabins and must be muzzled and leashed at all times, among other fairly strict requirements. Dutifully, he ties Pluto up outside. Milton the Cat eats Pluto’s dinner and snuggles up beside him to go to sleep, and Pluto feels he can do nothing about this. Most of the rest of the cartoon is taken up with an utterly deranged dream sequence wherein Milton—who talks in the dream, which Pluto does not—is a masochistic butler.
Like, Milton begs to be punished and even threatens suicide because Pluto won’t bite him. When Pluto does bite him, he screams in something between agony and ecstasy and feeds Pluto roast duck and sausages and steak. And later in the dream, “chocolate bone-bones,” presumably because the makers of the cartoon didn’t know or didn’t care that chocolate is toxic to dogs—after all, in a dream, does it really matter?
Probably because it’s so easy to forget that Pete is a cat and because Milton is so obscure a character, not a lot of people realize that cats are the other species to have both talking and not-talking variants in the Disney canon. We all know about the whole “what is Goofy?” debate, held among people who aren’t aware that Goofy started out as “Dippy Dawg.” But while Mickey both has a friend who’s a dog and keeps a dog on a leash, he also has an enemy who’s a cat and has a cat wander in and out of things when someone’s come up with a reason for him to. But Milton is also never explicitly said to be anyone’s cat and might be a stray—unlike Figaro, who we’ll get to another time.
Another strange thing I want to touch on is the fact that there are basically no cabins in Disney cartoons without shotguns, despite the fact that we routinely see accidents, near-misses, and even the odd attempted suicide. It’s more than a little unsettling, and while it would take a full degree is psychology to tease out everything that’s wrong with Dream-Milton in this short, the fact that he produces a shotgun is just one of those things that happens in Disney cartoons with the wilderness involved.
There’s also the fact that Mickey is barely in this cartoon—he’s just there enough to provide a framework. I think of this as being from his “Bing Crosby” period, where he sort of slouches around doing dad things and possibly wearing a hat. There is less likely to be a pipe involved with Mickey than there was with Bing, but it doesn’t feel outside the realm of possibility. The pairing of the Bing Mickey with the utter gonzo surrealism of the dream sequence makes the latter even stranger not just as a piece of animation but as a data point in where Disney was at the time.
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