Floyd Norman and the Mickey Mouse Comic Strip
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Disney Legend Floyd Norman is interviewed by legendary Disney historian Jim Korkis about Floyd’s various associations with Disney icon Mickey Mouse.
The Mickey Mouse comic strip ran from 1930 to 1995. For the last dozen years or so of the comic strip it was written and laid out by Floyd.
I am delighted that, while it touches base with Floyd’s other Mickey Mouse projects (heh heh), this interview, posted over the last two weeks, pays particular attention to Floyd’s years on the comic strip.
From Part One of the interview:
File this under “Jobs I Didn’t Want But Managed to Get Anyway.” Cal Howard thought I would be a perfect fit for the comic department some years earlier. At the time, I was very much involved with animated filmmaking and didn’t want a change. However, it was Greg Crosby who talked me into the job in November of 1983. It was also Mr. Crosby that stuck me with the Mickey Mouse Comic Strip. I did not want the job but Greg insisted I take it because he didn’t have anyone else capable of doing the job. Or, so he said.
Part Two has Floyd telling more about his time on the Mickey Mouse comic strip, including the nugget that somewhere in the Disney Tombs is a finished continuity:
The story I labored on for weeks was never published or read by anyone. Disney’s Publishing Group was moving through a difficult transition at the time, and my little Mickey Mouse story was the least of their concerns. The story was penciled, inked and lettered but that was the end of it.
If that whets your appetite for more Floyd and Jim (and I’m sure it does), here’s some more…
Floyd also wrote the last of the Disney/King Features Christmas Strips, of special interest was Floyd writing the Song of the South tale in 1986. The Song of the South is a film Disney is, in the U.S., still trying to pretend never happened. Here is Floyd and Jim discussing the obstacles Floyd had in overcoming Executive Apprehension about publishing his Uncle Remus Christmas Tale.
“As you might have imagined, Disney was skittish about raising any awareness of a movie they had been trying to bury for years. And, while Disney’s view of the South, on which Joel Chandler Harris based his delightful stories, might be considered naive, they were never malicious or offensive.”
Last year IDW gathered the holiday strips in Disney’s Christmas Classics but they couldn’t call it a “complete” collection because, you guessed it, the powers-that-be refused to allow the Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Christmas to be published in that volume.
And, because there’s no such thing as too much Floyd, here he is writing on his blog about his attempt to convert the Mickey Mouse comic strip from gag-a-day to adventure continuity.
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