With Steamboat Willie (the original Mickey Mouse cartoon) now in the public domain, all the immature and dirty-minded adults are out in full force, gleefully hurling every bit of filthy, perverted, and morbid humor they could think of at this icon of American childhood. I could not help but think of the Bible verse (Lk. 17:1-2), “It is impossible that scandals should not come: but woe to him through whom they come. It were better for him, that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should scandalize one of these little ones.”
It’s not priggish or Puritanical to note that there is a time and a place for everything. Shakespeare can be very funny when he does bawdy humor, but he wasn’t writing plays for children, nor did he pretend to be what we would call G-rated. He also didn’t steal characters from other creators, characters meant to be friends for children, and deliberately put sex jokes in their mouths. I love to watch Taming of the Shrew, but I’m not going to do so with a 10-year-old. Part of our problem in modern society is that nothing is sacred. Perhaps it sounds silly to you to say a cartoon mouse should be “sacred,” but I use the word in the sense of something kept apart from the darker or more adult aspects of life. When children grew up believing in Santa Claus and not knowing the details of baby-making, they were a mentally and morally healthier lot than the cynical, disillusioned, dead-spirited young people of today.
If you want to make a horror movie, make up your own character, or borrow one specifically designed for such a genre, like Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. Don’t specifically take characters meant to be innocent, clean, pure, and child-friendly. There is no talent or virtue in corrupting a character like Mickey Mouse—any half-wit from the gutter can do so, and it is a sign of immaturity, not a mark of maturity. A mature adult knows what is appropriate when. An overgrown man-child has no sense of appropriateness or limitation, because he has never learned to discern, distinguish, or reason well. That pretty accurately describes modern America. We are a nation of over-grown and under-developed children.
There is a flawed notion in modernity that the more one talks about sex, the more mature one is. The reality is that anyone and everyone can exercise his lusts. What distinguishes a well-developed and rational adult is the ability to control one’s lusts, and, again, to know the proper time and place. God made sex good, and he also confined its exercise within the narrow limits of a husband and wife in privacy (that much is blindingly clear from the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, which condemn fornication, homosexuality, and even thinking about another woman with lust—see Matt. 5:28, an excellent argument in support of the Catholic teaching condemning all porn as sinful).
Another point is that innocence is not the same thing as naïveté. A child must and should be innocent, as the Bible verse I cited at the start of this article illustrates. In fact, all of us should retain a touch of innocence, meaning a lack of curiosity for curiosity’s sake, and a love for the pure, good, and noble. A person can be wise and intelligent and still innocent. See the character of Michael in Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross or Isabella from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for examples. Many of the ancient philosophers and theologians heavily emphasized a sense of wonder as essential for a healthy, happy mind and life; as Jesus put it (Matt. 18:3), “Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” To the modern U.S. child or adult, nothing inspires a sense of wonder, and we are more depressed and mentally damaged than ever before.
It took a genius with child-like wonder and a love of innocence to create Mickey Mouse. It takes no special intelligence, only a love of making the beautiful ugly and the good bad, to corrupt Mickey Mouse. I know which man I would rather support; and which man’s legacy will outlive his age with praise instead of censure.
Well said!