TV REVIEW : Mickey’s 60th Birthday Special Doesn’t Have Magic

Less a celebration than a desecration, “Mickey’s 60th Birthday Special,” an episode of “The Magical World of Disney” airing Sunday at 7 p.m. on NBC (Channels 4, 36, 39), manages to make the world’s most popular cartoon character seem unappealing.

When Roger Rabbit disrupts the taping of his birthday special, Mickey uses the magic hat from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” to restore order. An unknown wizard casts a spell on him that prevents people from recognizing him--a punishment for taking another’s magic. (Whose? The hat was in his trunk.)

Two ersatz newscasters report on his “disappearance” while a morose Mickey visits the casts of “Family Ties,” “Cheers” and other NBC programs in a parade of B-list notables that plugs a lot of shows, but has nothing to do with Mickey. He “rediscovers” his magic in an amateurish production number with Cheech Marin and Phylicia Rashad, and everyone is happy--except the comatose viewers.

The new animation of the Disney characters is flat and pedestrian. Mickey has always been a winner and primarily a mime character. The special turns him into a whining chatterbox who would have been consigned to the animation rubbish heap decades ago.

The minimal information the audience receives about Mickey is neither complete nor accurate. No mention is made of Ub Iwerks, the animator who designed the character’s physical appearance. The statement that Walt and Mickey received the Academy Award in 1932 is accompanied by a 1938 photo of Disney with the special Oscar for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Nor does the narrator mention that the Academy Award Disney received in 1932 was a special one for the creation of Mickey Mouse.

“Mickey’s 60th Birthday Special” was written and produced by Joie Albrecht and Scott Garen and directed by Garen.