Old Navy, Disney slip vintage Mickeys onto T-shirts
Old Navy and Disney Consumer Products have launched a line of T-shirts bearing rarely seen Mickey Mouse artwork from the Disney archives, both companies announced Monday.
Marking Mickey’s 85th year (somehow he doesn’t look a day over 55 to us) the “Mickey Through the Decades” collection features a variety of images depicting the most famous mouse from Walt’s house as he’s looked over the years.
Among them: the angry and scowling Mickey with his hands on his hips, the maligned Mickey with a horseshoe being dropped on his head, and Mickey the ambassador of fun times, smiling from the concentric circles of the Mickey Mouse Club logo.
And, despite the name of the collection, chairman Mouse isn’t the only character getting graphic tee time. In some of the fresh-from-the-archive images, Mickey and Minnie speed around in a convertible, in another Minnie straightens her beau’s bow tie. In others Minnie goes solo, dashing off with a pocketbook in hand and sensible heels on her feet (think Minnie Mouse as office secretary a la “Mad Men”) or wearing a festive floral hat.
The topic of hats brings me to Donald Duck -- the original angry bird -- who is featured on two T-shirts. On one he’s sporting the familiar beret-like sailor’s cap, but on the other he’s wearing a wholly unfamiliar blue-and-yellow knit ski cap with a yellow pom-pom on top. It made me wonder when Donald Duck, exactly, switched up his headgear. (Was he drafted? Or did he just wear the knit cap on covert maneuvers?)
That got me wondering about the dates of all the Mickey and friends images; what year were they from? What was going on in the world? Of all the 28 shirts in the collection, only three shirts --- featuring Mickey and Minnie together -- appear to include a date (1928). If you’re going to try to make hay with rare plucked-from-the-archives images, I might suggest including the year to kind of contextualize the cool.
The “Mickey Through the Decades” collection, available now in Old Navy stores and online, includes T-shirts for women, men, kids and toddlers that retail from $12.94 to $24.94.
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