Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Mickey Mouse)
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Mickey Mouse is in prison, chained to six other convicts and led out to break rocks under the eye of the guard, Peg-Leg Pete. He keeps grinning, banging his ball and chain in time and singing until Pete tells him to shut up. When the guard dozes, Mickey plays "The Prisoner's Song" on his harmonica, the convicts join in on their picks and shovels, and one dances to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" until he spits on the guard and wakes him. Pete whistles for help, a riot breaks out, the guards open fire and Mickey escapes over the wall on a seesaw. Chased into a swamp by a guard with two bloodhounds, he tries to flee on a pair of horses, loses control, and is thrown back through the prison roof into his own cell, where the film ends with the bloodhounds licking him.
Why It Matters
- The two bloodhounds are the first appearance of the dog who became Pluto, and the whole cartoon is a good example of the early Mickey's cheerful amorality: he is in jail for no stated reason, and the film is on his side. The musical prison yard, with the chain gang playing their tools, is the studio's rhythmic style at its most inventive.
- Variety called it "one of the most amusing cartoons released", and it is one of the Mickey Mouse films of 1930 that entered the American public domain on 1 January 2026, as the copyright on works published in 1930 expired. Along with Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, it is now among the few Disney films anyone may copy and show, which gives it a new importance for a book of this kind.
Notes and Trivia
- Burt Gillett, who directed, went on to Three Little Pigs and then to the Van Beuren studio.
- The film was released on the Walt Disney Treasures DVD Mickey Mouse in Black and White in 2002.
- See also: Steamboat Willie (1928), Plane Crazy (1928), The Skeleton Dance (1929).