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!

Usually, when Mickey Mouse is paired up with Donald Duck (or, more often than not, with Donald and Goofy), they separate and do their own routines, with Mickey getting the comedy short stick. Here, however, the two are constantly in contention, and the cartoon is all the better for it. Mickey is a magician whose act is constantly being interrupted by a certain web-footed heckler in the balcony. He soon makes Donald an unwilling assistant, using his skills of prestidigitation to humiliate him. He makes him spit out cards, turns him into a paper doll chain, and even makes a monkey out of him, literally. It's a pity they weren't used more as adversaries, since it brings out the best in them, pitting Mickey's resourcefulness and pluck against Donald's irascibility and mischievousness. Incidentally, Goofy is in this one also, mostly out of sight as a stage hand. Highly recommended.

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.

Mickey is a master magician. He is utterly amazing. The problem is a heckler in the audience, Donald Duck. Mr. Duck is abusive and confrontational (really?). He begins to try to sabotage the act, but it only leads to greater and greater tricks where Donald becomes the victim. In true cartoon tradition, Donald will not let it go. It soon becomes a color extravaganza, with Goofy, the stage hand, getting his two cents worth in.

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.