All Things Disney

One of my friends on Facebook was starting her gingerbread house today (she's a professional baker, doing specialty wedding cakes and such) and was taking suggestions of after what she should model the house. I suggested the train station at the entrance of Disneyland. She's a Disneyland nut (living just a few miles from the park) and really liked the idea.

Now I sit down to write today's post and who should be the protagonist of our next cartoon but Mickey himself. This reminded me of the freebie park tickets I used to get as a member of the press. This is the second Christmas season we haven't taken someone to the Magic Kingdom.

So here it is, "Mickey's Good Deed," which was created in 1932. Many of these depression-era cartoons deal with the huge disparity between the wealthy and the destitute. These days we don't seem to care too much about that, even though the gap between the very rich and the very poor is every widening in this new century.



It's interesting that Mickey's good deed was to betray his best friend in order to give a merry Christmas to a bunch of cats. Also interesting is that the rich father and son are portrayed as pigs, an image that was carried over into the protest decade of the 1960s.

Here are two shots of our Disneyana ornaments. The first is a "hidden Mickey" disco ball (purchased at Downtown Disney on our way out of the park) and the other is one of a dozen small Mickey ornaments on the tree. We do not have a Tinkerbell or Cinderella, but we do have a Barbie ornament which Steve inherited from his mom.

Today we went down to Di-No Computers and found out about laptops for that design studio I'm thinking of starting up. I'll have to do it by the end of the year if I want to get tax breaks on all the design equipment and software I've bought this year. I'm starting to sketch out potential marketing plans and trying to come up with a bare-bones budget to get up and started. I'm thinking I could concentrate more on a full-service approach to business and marketing design, emphasizing the benefits of print promotion while integrating that with a web presence.

One last thing I have decided this evening: We need more holiday decorations. And I'm not really sure what we're going to do with all the tree lights that we no longer need, what with a prelit tree now. Perhaps the two will have some sort of mutual and inexpensive solution.