A Closer Look at Two Of Our Favorite Disney Couples: Mickey & Minnie, Walt & Lilly
During the month of Valentine’s Day we here at MickeyBlog wanted to take time to celebrate two (well three but you’ll need to read more) of our favorite Disney couples: Mickey & Minnie and Walt & Lilly.
Few pop culture couples have withstood the test of time quite like Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Over the past century, they have been making us laugh with their hijinks and moving us with their devotion to one another.
“Over the years Minnie has often been the impetus of the story for Mickey; the goal or prize he’s fighting to obtain,” says Disney writer and historian Keith Gluck, although he adds, “Minnie has also demonstrated that she can be quite independent when she wants to be.”
According to Wayne Allwine who voiced the role of Mickey for 32 years, “The characters are scripted to always be in love.” But were they married? According to a recent piece in Disney Parks Blog, all the way back in 1933 Walt was asked (for an interview in Film Pictorial magazine) if Mickey and Minnie had tied the knot. He explained, “A lot of people have written to him asking this question because sometimes he appears to be married to her in his films and other times still courting her. What it really amounts to is that Minnie is, for screen purposes, his leading lady. If the story calls for a romantic courtship, then Minnie is the girl; but when the story requires a married couple, then they appear as man and wife.”
This brings us to our next much-loved Disney couple Wayne Allwine who as we mentioned above voiced Mickey Mouse for 32 years actually wed the actress that voiced Minnie Mouse – Russi Taylor! The happy couple tried to keep the marriage on the down-low. “When we got married, we kind of kept it quiet, because everybody was saying, ‘Oh, Mickey and Minnie got married,’” Allwine recalled. “It wasn’t Mickey and Minnie; it was Wayne and Russi. We wanted to keep it about us and not about the characters.”
But the closeness and bond between voices and characters were undeniable as well as the way they perceived Mickey and Minnie as a reflection of their own personalities, talents, and emotions.
Finally, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the two couples above and the relationship between Walt Disney and his wife Lilly. As Disney lore goes, it was actually Lilly who helped Walt come up with this name Mickey (instead of Walt’s idea Mortimer) and it was Lilly and her sister-in-law Edna that actually painted the cels for the first Mickey and Minnie cartoon ever made – “Plane Crazy” in the summer of 1928.
This is but one beautiful chapter in what would be a lifelong romance. As the story goes, when Walt and Lilly first met he would drive her and another ink-and-paint girl home and would always make sure to drop off Lilly last in order to spend more time with her.
Another funny anecdote is that Walt wore a hat that was worn, rumpled and used to annoy Lilly. On her birthday in 1941, Walt presented her with an arrangement of violets cascading out of and over a low vase. When she removed the flowers, the “vase” was revealed to be that annoying favorite hat—preserved in bronze, with the crown-shaped into a heart.
Like all the humans behind the creation of Mickey and Minnie, the success of this beloved and loving pair comes from their own love of Mickey and Minnie. “There’s an approval factor from the characters to the public,” Russi Taylor said. “They don’t judge you. They never will. And I think that’s a thing that people want, and that keeps people coming back for more. It’s love. And people want love.”
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