Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Mickey drives a small steam locomotive with a face, which he feeds with coal from the tender as if feeding a pet; it eats too much and burps. He sits down to a plate of spaghetti and plays Dvořák's Humoresque on the strands. Minnie arrives with a fiddle and climbs onto the freight car, and the two play a duet before Mickey calls "All aboard!" and the engine, whistling happily, pulls out through the countryside to "I've Been Working on the Railroad". A hill proves too steep; the engine strains, slips and breaks apart, and the runaway freight car with Minnie aboard rolls back down the line with Mickey chasing it, until the two of them end up pumping a handcar together into the distance.
Why It Matters
- The living locomotive is the best-animated machine in the early Mickeys, with a personality of its own, and the film's gags, several of them recycled from Disney's Oswald cartoon Trolley Troubles, show the studio mining its own past; it is also the first film in which Mickey says more than a couple of words, in a voice that sounds like Walt's own.
- Released in 1929, the cartoon is out of copyright in the United States. The closing image of Mickey and Minnie on the handcar inspired the Lionel Corporation's Mickey Mouse handcar toy of 1934, which sold so well that Lionel credited it with saving the company from bankruptcy.
Notes and Trivia
- Minnie's ride on the freight car is scored to "Dixie".
- The spaghetti Humoresque was a vaudeville gag transferred to the screen.
- See also: Trolley Troubles (1927), Mickey's Follies (1929), The Jazz Fool (1929).