The Delivery Boy - June 13, 1931

Mickey's 29th toon is The Delivery Boy. The toon features Mickey and Minnie as well as the emerging character Pluto in his fourth cartoon.

The toon opens with Mickey as a delivery boy traveling along the road with his trusty pal Pluto in tow.

Along the same road, we see Minnie happily washing her laundry. Unfortunately as she dries her unmentionables, a nearby goat promptly gobbles them up.


Seeing Minnie, Mickey is unable to pass up the chance to have a little fun. He tries startling his love, but the joke soon turns in Minnie's favor.

The two lovemice frolic off under an apple tree and sing a rousing version of "Sitting Under the Old Apple Tree".

Meanwhile, a curious Pluto gets into a sticky situation when his nose leads him to a puddle of tar. A funny gag is seen as Pluto mimics the dancing of Mickey and Minnie.

Mickey soon gets a bit carried away in the song and causes a beehive to land on his mule. The mule kicks the delivery wagon, and the entire load of instruments is sent into the air.

The instruments rain down upon the apple orchard, allowing the mice to play another tune: "Stars and Stripes Forever".

The nearby farm animals also join in on the fun and play various instruments. I particularly enjoy the caterpillar drummer gag.


One of Mickey's specialties in these early song-and-dance toons is using various animals as instruments; here he uses a turtle to play a drum and a mule to play cymbals. Mickey and Minnie seem to be master musicians as they can both play horns while pounding on the piano with their feet.

As the song plays on, curious Pluto begins to sniff around even more. As he moves along, he passes a string of signs warning (in different languages) of explosive danger ahead.

This toon is placed in the From the Vault section of the DVD for the joke included here. The Hebrew sign not only is shaped like a stereotypical Jew, but the "hat" atop the sign becomes a turtle who does a stereotypical Jewish dance.

Pluto makes his way to the dynamite site where, funnily enough, Peg-Leg Pete can be seen in a brief cameo. As the dynamite is thrown, Pluto decides to play a game of fetch and brings the explosive back to Mickey and Minnie.

In a funny gag, all of Pluto's fleas flee the dog in order to avoid the explosive blast.

Right on cue, the dynamite explodes in perfect unison with the music. As the dust settles we see Mickey, Minnie, and a now hairless mule still playing on with just as much joy.

Traffic Troubles - March 17, 1931

Mickey's 26th cartoon is the highly entertaining Traffic Troubles. The toon features great animation, fast-paced music, and a solid story.

Traffic Troubles features Mickey as a cab driver in the big city, a change of pace for this countryside critter. It was an interesting choice to give a face and personality to Mickey's cab, a characteristic also given to Mickey's train in Mickey's Choo-Choo. The technique gives life to a normally lifeless object and provides for more comic relief. Mickey's taxi here is like a mute Benny the Cab from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

It's not too long before Mickey finds his first customer of the day.

Because the customer is rather rotund, it's a hassle trying to load him into the cab. Mickey finally succeeds, but only after causing a major traffic jam.

The traffic jam does not go unnoticed by the street constable, played by Pete. After reprimanding Mickey, Pete sends the Mouse on his way.

The streets are jam-packed with various critters in cars. Sharp-eyed viewers will of course spot Horace Horsecollar in a quick cameo.


Like I said, it was a good choice to allow the cab to have a personality. The addition of facial expressions gives these scenes so much more life.

A great gag I enjoy occurs due to the many bumps in the road. Mickey notices his fare calculator keeps malfunctioning, adding more and more money to the cab cost. He's delighted, until another bump causes the fare to jump down to a measley $0.60! The look on the Mouse's face is priceless.

Even that $0.60 looks good after an extremely large road bump causes Mickey's customer to go flying out of the cab, leaving the Mouse with no profit. Of course you have to admire the irony that this well-to-do swine ends up covered in filthy mud.


With an open cab, Mickey is then able to pick up a frantic Minnie. Along the way, the two entertain themselves with some tunes.

Unfortunately, the cab comes to a screeching halt once its back tire is unexpectedly blown out. The license plate gag here is my favorite in the whole toon.

Mickey manages to find a nearby pig to use as a makeshift pump; however, the pig pump idea is nothing more than a bunch of hot air.

In enters Dr. Pep, a character also played by the talented Pete (notice how Pete dons his peg-leg for the part). Seeing a potential customer in Mickey, Dr. Pep gives the cab a free sample of his very own Snake Oil.

The Snake Oil has a horrible effect on the cab, causing it to sputter and spew about. Soon it bolts from the road and into the countryside.


The cab drives through the grass so quickly that it fails to notice the large rock in its path. Soon Mickey and Minnie are on a crazy ride inside a warped cab atop a terrified cow.

The resulting camera chase is very thrilling and funny. It is very similar to the cow chase in 1929's Plane Crazy.
The spooked cow manages to break through the back of a barn, emerging with frightened chickens in tow.

The chase finally comes to an end when the cow runs headfirst into a silo, and the screen is momentarily filled with feathers.

As the feathers settle, everyone seems to be ok; however, Mickey's cab is no more, reduced to a pile of shambles.


Traffic Troubles is definitely an entertaining and funny cartoon. As a side note, the film is available for viewing inside Disneyland's Main Street Cinema.

The Chain Gang - September 5, 1930

The Chain Gang is Mickey's 21st cartoon. The film is significant due to the appearance of the character who would eventually become Pluto.

The toon opens on a somber note as we see a chain gang pass sadly from one end of the screen to the other. Bringing up the rear is the oddly happy Mickey banging away on his prison ball. To keep the Mouse company we also see Clarabelle Cow as well as a group of Pete look-alikes playing the prison guards.

It seems the life of a prison guard is too boring for Pete, so he promptly takes a nap during his shift. Mickey and the other prisoners take this opportunity to have some fun and play some happy tunes.

The catchy rhythm causes one prisoner to get a little carried away. His tobacco spit lands on the dozing Pete and wakes the guard up.

Startled by the sudden intrusion of his nap time, Pete starts screaming and drwas the attention of his fellow guards. The guards think a riot is afoot and begin bombarding the prison yard with bullets, causing a mass panic.

In the chaos, Mickey manages to jump over the prison wall and escape safely through the woods.

Unfortunately for the Mouse, a pair of bloodhounds are sent to track him down and recapture him. Leonard Maltin and Disney maintain that this character eventually becomes Pluto in later toons. It's hard for me to believe this, since the dog has nothing really in common with Pluto's personality (the dog in Mickey's Choo-Choo is much more Pluto-like), but there's no sense in arguing with Disney, right?

To escape the hounds, Mickey steals a pair of horses who cause more trouble for the Mouse than he would like (a great gag, especially for men).

The horses prove to be horrible luck for Mickey, and I'm sure the Mouse would agree as he is thrown off a cliff. A great shot follows with the Mouse heading straight towards the camera. Oh, if only 3-D had been invented in the '30s.

It turns out that the cliff is above the prison. Mickey crashes right through the roof and lands in cell, bringing his short prison escape to an end.

The Cactus Kid - May 5, 1930

18th in Mickey's black and white cartoon series is The Cactus Kid, an entertaining remake of 1928's more primitive The Gallopin' Gaucho.

The toon begins with gaucho Mickey riding through the Mexican desert on his trusty steed, Horace Horsecollar. It's nice to see Horace being featured more and more in these cartoons even though he is still stuck with playing bit parts.

Minnie stars alongside Mickey as a beautiful cantina gal. Though her role in this toon is the same as her role in The Gallopin' Gaucho, it's amazing how much better the animation is here. It had only been two years, and yet the Disney Studios clearly had made leaps and bounds in the animation process.

Soon Peg-Leg Pedro shows up looking for some love in all the wrong places. An interesting note here is that Pete speaks for the first time when he says to Minnie, "You give me little kiss, yes?"

Luckily for Minnie Mickey is right there to defend his love; however, Pedro is not amused by the Mouse's act of bravery.

What follows is a sporadic gun fight between Mickey and Pedro, one that takes place in the pitch black darkness of the cantina. I marvel at this short sequence because it's such a fantastic use of special effects and shadows.

Pedro manages to escape in the dark with Minnie and a short chase ensues, ending with Pedro hanging on for dear life on the side of a cracking cliff.

The cliff's edge soon gives way and Pedro is sent tumbling down the side with a huge boulder behind him.

The Barnyard Battle - April 25, 1929

The Barnyard Battle is Mickey's 7th cartoon and one that Minnie does not appear in at all. The film is one of the more enjoyable for me because it's very rooted in history and is essentially a time capsule. The battle that occurs in the barnyard takes much inspiration from World War I, and the animators must have felt close to that source. Walt Disney especially was fascinated by WWI (having served as an ambulance driver in France), and he no doubt was very involved with the toon's production.

The cartoon opens with Mickey visiting the recruitment office in order to enlist in the Mouse Army. The fact that Mickey is cast as a soldier really establishes his everyman quality that he is so famous for today. Audiences at the time, especially war veterans, must have been able to relate well to the mouse because they were seeing him in familiar situations. The key to Mickey's success was (and is) his large amount of tangibility to the audience.

It also helped that Walt Disney wanted to make his character a funny and amusing one with jokes such as the above pop-gun.

The enemy of the Mice is naturally the Cat Army. Made up entirely of Pete's extended family, the Cats are gruesome characters clearly meant to represent the Germans from WWI.

Taking a look at the battle itself, we can see the Cats and Mice engaging in trench warfare. This is yet another inspiration taken from WWI.

Though the toon deals with war, there are plenty of fun gags present. My favorite is this one involving Mickey and a machine gun. When he runs out of bullets, Mickey substitutes piano keys instead which wreak havoc on the Cats while playing a catchy tune.

Once again we see a design mistake on another mouse that is not Mickey. The bandleader is sporting Mickey's trademark buttoned shorts.

In the end, Mickey single-handedly defeats the Cats by bopping them on the head and throwing them into a pile of defeat.