Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Mickey rides up to a Mexican cantina where Minnie is the waitress. He plays the spoons and dances for her, and when he cheekily tweaks her nose she scolds him in Spanish and pelts him with lamps and bottles until a silly dance and a piano number win her back. Peg-Leg Pete, here a Mexican bandit with a wooden leg, swaggers in, seizes Minnie, takes a drink and demands a kiss. Mickey stands up to him, both draw, the lights go out and a gunfight rages in the dark. Pete carries Minnie off on his donkey; Mickey follows, is dragged through the cactus by his horse, catches up, leaps onto the donkey and punches Pete off a cliff, where a boulder flattens him. Mickey, Minnie and the horse wave goodbye to a two-dimensional Pete.
Why It Matters
- It is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon in which Marcellite Garner voices Minnie; an ink-and-paint girl hired because she could read Spanish, she was asked to try the singing and kept the part for eleven years. It is also the first film to call the villain Peg-Leg Pete by that name on screen, and the first in which Norm Ferguson, later the animator of Pluto, is credited.
- Its 1930 copyright expired at the start of 2026, and it is public domain in the United States. The plot is a remake of The Gallopin' Gaucho of 1928, with Mexico for Argentina and a gunfight for a knife fight, and it is the last Mickey to use the gaucho-era rivalry between Mickey and Pete before the series settled into gentler comedy.
Notes and Trivia
- Garner recalled being "scared to death" at the audition on the Melrose Avenue sound stage.
- Pete's flattening by a boulder is one of the earliest uses of the two-dimensional-villain gag.
- See also: The Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), The Barnyard Concert (1930), The Fire Fighters (1930).