Mickey Magicien

"Mickey" is doing his best to entertain an audience with his magical trickery but "Donald" is sitting in his front row box determined to expose him as a shyster! He continually attempts to disrupt the act - but each time he is bettered by the increasingly irritated entertainer who eventually resorts to filling "Donald" with decks of playing cards so as to stifle his constant haranguing. This is an enjoyable comedy that has a duelling nature to it. The comedy is end-to-end for eight minutes of combative fun that uses magic (well conjuring and illusionism, really) as a conduit for the action that leads to a suitably messy ending that wouldn't have looked out of place in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice". Good fun!

STORY- Same story structure formula used with the hilarious Boat Builders.

Beginning: Join 3 opposite characters in same adventure.

Progress: Let them build a moving sensitive action-packed construction.

Ending: Destroy the construction as a sum of all 3 heroes' faults.

SETTINGS - My favorite. Proscenium Arch.

HEROES - Mickey Mouse on the stage facing his fans and audience applausing him for his mind and hand tricks.

Goofy on the backstage working as a light technician reference to Nikola Tesla.

Donald Duck as a nasty prank-maker who confronts Mickey's tricks by his own brutal force pranks.

MOTIVE - Donald does not enjoy Mickey's magician tricks. So he jumps off to the stage mockering and making a fool out of Mickey. But Mickey has enough magician tools to cause Donald bigger troubles than he can ever imagine. Goofy in the meantime does not interfere with the duo, yet he cannot run the show focusing the light and effects on more than one host. By the final prank Donald does it to Mickey, Goofy totally fails to maintain the backstage and the entire theatre falls apart nail to nail.

In this short, Mickey is performing magic tricks on stage while Goofy does all the behind the scenes work, even though all of Mickey's tricks seem to be for real.

But Donald, as usual, isn't convinced and causes a fuss with his loud sarcasm and shouting. Mickey quickly silences him by using his magic. Donald becomes part of the act and is humiliated in various ways. It's actually quite imaginative and much better than the usual Mickey cartoons.

If only Mickey (who only has one line here) consistently kept to this high standard. He really needs Donald to make him funnier than he is and it's pretty obvious in this cartoon that the laughs come from angry Duck.

In "Magician Mickey", the mouse is trying to put on a magic show and inexplicably, Donald does everything he can to be a nuisance and destroy the act. However, Mickey seems to have god-like powers and again and again, he uses them to thwart Donald....yet Donald keeps coming back for more!

Like all the Mickey and friends cartoons of the 1930s, this one is gorgeously animated and is head and shoulders better looking than the competition, such as MGM and Warner Brothers. Beautiful backgrounds, smooth animation AND no cutesy songs (a problem in many 30s cartoon shorts) make this well worth seeing....and it's among the better shorts by Disney. A delight.

I completely agree with anyone who says Magician Mickey is one of the better Mickey Mouse shorts, if not the best. It is funny, enormously entertaining, and even after multiple viewings you can never grow tired of it. I do think the pace is a tad too fast, but other than that, it is all a delight to watch. Pinto Colvig, Walt Disney and Clarence Nash voice Goofy, Mickey and Donald(who is absolutely hilarious here) to perfection. The Technicolour animation is very fine, and the music score is lively. The plot is brisk and simply told, about Mickey performing magic tricks, Donald starts interrupting the proceedings and Mickey decides to humiliate him. This is clear evidence why I love this lovable trio of Toons so much. 9/10 Bethany Cox