The Tramp & The Mouse

Taken from my Letterboxd review of The Fatal Mallet (1914).

Two of cinema's earliest universal icons, Charlie Chaplin's Tramp and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, followed a similar trajectory: they started off as these very primal creatures, driven by impulses and instincts such as lust, jealousy, rage and stubbornness, with little care for the consequences. Presumably, part of why they caught on with audiences the way they did was that they sort of served as our Id, behaving mischievously and sometimes outright badly in ways we might wish we could if we weren't so damned civilized. It was cathartic to see them lob a brick right at some big annoying guy's head, especially since we were safe in the knowledge that this was the world of comedy so said annoying guy would shake it off and be fine in the end. No harm, no foul. Wouldn't you like to do that?

Eventually, these rough edges were sanded down and the characters became gentler, more pathos-driven. The difference is that with the Tramp, this less-aggressive version of the character allowed him to soar to his highest heights-- it's hard to imagine the mean-spirited Tramp we see in the early Keystone short The Fatal Mallet carrying a feature like Modern Times or (especially) The Great Dictator. Whereas when Mickey got nicer, he consequently wound up taking a backseat to his more interesting co-stars who were allowed to do dangerous and stupid things, Donald Duck and Goofy.

Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney in 1939.

I think the key difference here is that the Tramp's personality shift seemed to be an organic evolution, the product of Chaplin becoming more intimate with the character as the years passed and he figured out who he was, and who he wasn't. It didn't feel like a subtraction, it felt like he was being fleshed out. Conversely, Walt Disney admitted in a moment of candid frustration that Mickey's de-fanging was a product of parents complaining their children imitated him every time he misbehaved ^[1]. It was a concession to Disney's efforts to more-deliberately court family audiences and become a staple of wholesome Americana, something Chaplin consistently rejected, even when it wound up causing problems for him.

Would this make Donald Duck Monsieur Verdoux? Hell, I'd watch that.

1. In 1953, Walt Disney said, “Mickey’s our problem child. He’s so much of an institution that we’re limited in what we can do with him. If we have Mickey kicking someone in the pants we get a million letters from mothers telling us we’re giving their kids the wrong ideas. Mickey must always be sweet, always lovable. What can you do with such a leading man?”  (Sourced from Joshua Glenn) ^[top]