The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Jim Korkis Page B

cartoons?
    Gottfredson : We tried to follow the spirit of the Mickey animated cartoons but because we were doing adventure stories we had to go beyond them. The animated cartoons had just a loose story structure where there could be a lot of gags building to a conclusion.
    That isn’t how stories are done in newspaper strips. We had to develop the characters more to help sustain the story. I loved doing these little adventures but keeping them as humorous as possible. Straight gags are too thin. Not enough meat to them. I think going back to gag-a-day was a step backwards and I think this was proved by the drop in popularity of the strip.
    Korkis: Weren’t some of your early strips influenced by Mickey’s animated adventures?
    Gottfredson : Walt himself set the precedent for borrowing ideas from the cartoons. The strip was influenced by the cartoons but also the fads and movies of the day. The Mad Doctor influenced the strip story “Mickey Mouse in Blaggard Castle”, although the mad professors in our story were modeled after a Boris Karloff movie I had just seen. 
    “Mickey and the Seven Ghosts” was inspired by the animated cartoon Lonesome Ghosts . “Mickey Mouse Runs His Own Newspaper” was inspired by the gangster movies of the time like Scarface and Little Caesar . 
    Korkis: Did you ever run into the same censorship issues that Walt was facing with the animated cartoons?
    Gottfredson : There was one sequence in the “Blaggard Castle” story where Mickey grabs a pole and vaults over this alligator pit but as he is leaping, the pole breaks. King Features sent us a frantic telegram that they were going to cut out the entire sequence because the alligators would upset women and children reading the newspaper.
    I took the photostats to Walt and he just laughed. He thought it was a good adventure and was confident that we had a way of making the resolution of the peril humorous. So he contacted the syndicate and they left it in.
    We also got censored when we did the “Monarch of Medioka” story because it kind of paralleled what was actually happening in Yugoslavia at that time where the archduke was trying to overthrow the king. Over the years, there was very little censorship because our goal was to try to stay true to the spirit of Disney animation.
    Korkis: Did Walt have to approve your work before it was sent to the syndicate?
    Gottfredson lt checked my work for the first couple of months after I took over the strip, but after that and all through the years, except to pass on an occasional suggestion, he very seldom concerned himself with the strip or the department.
    He seemed relieved not to have to be concerned with them. He had bigger things to worry about. We were just supposed to follow the general studio rule that any violence was to be done in a comedic manner. And we labored over the artwork to make it the highest quality we could.
    Korkis: So Walt had no direct input into the direction of the strip?
    Gottfredson : In the early days of the strip, I was always intrigued by details in the background like houses and picket fences and rain spouts. So one of the hardest things I had to learn was to simplify, to streamline. In the first couple of months that I worked on the strip, I would take the strips personally to Walt in his office for his approval.
    Later, as I said, he became too busy to take the time to do that or maybe he just felt I was doing okay. I do know he would still look at the proof sheets closely because sometimes I would get memos but that was usually about any changes that was going to happen in animation that we needed to do in strips.
    The only direct input I would get from Walt was that I was putting in too much “junk” in the strip. “Why do you put so much junk in there? Simplify.” I don’t know if that was to help the storytelling or because of his experience in animation where you didn’t want the background too complicated.
    One time when he was in Florida, he sent