Great Film overall

Good idea lost in the noise

A lot of fun.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

This is an early Mickey Mouse cartoon produced by the Disney studio. There will be spoilers ahead:This is a very simple, basic cartoon. Mickey is training a robot to box against a gorilla (The Kongo Killer). Mickey times the robot by playing a piano and the robot is rather uninspired until Minnie blows her car horn, at which point the robot goes amok, busting a safe, punching through a wall poster of the gorilla (and the wall it's hanging on) and going outside, knocking itself out. Minnie revives it with here horn and it goes careening off to the arena, punching wildly and furiously.Once the fight starts, the robot reverts to being tentative and uninspired. The gorilla has no such problem and basically mauls the robot, turning him almost into a junk pile. As the referee is counting him out, Minnie remembers her horn, gets it and blows it, again reviving the robot, to the point where it mops up the ring with the Kongo Killer. The robot wins in the best scene in the short. The end makes up for the somewhat slow pacing in the beginning of the short.Tis short is available on the Disney Treasures Mickey Mouse in Black and White, Volume Two DVD set. This short is worth watch at least once.

Disney I have always loved. Mickey's Mechanical Man is not one of their best, or even Mickey's best, with a set up that once Minnie's horn sets the robot off there are no surprises about what is going to happen and an end gag that is on the weird side, but it is still very good. The animation is really top-notch, very crisp and clean and while Mickey and Minnie are very controlled in their designs it is the wonderfully kinetic and increasingly frantic movements of the robot that stand out. The music is catchy and superbly orchestrated, while the gags especially when the robot loses control are very funny and the premise- revolving around a boxing match- is silly yet clever. Mickey and Minnie continue to be likable characters, and Beppo is appropriately antagonistic but it was the robot that makes Mickey's Menchanical Man as good as it is, very well animated and the best gags of the short are with it. All in all, a very good and fun short if not one of the greats. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The basic plot for "Mickey's Mechanical Man" was very familiar to me, as I've seen it at least twice before in Three Stooges' shorts. While IMDb says that the plot to "Punch Drunks" (1934) was entirely written by the Stooges themselves, the film came out a year AFTER this Disney cartoon--making you wonder just how original their screenplay was. In addition, the Shemp Howard remade the film a decade later as "A Hit and a Miss". Watch the Stooges film--you'll see what I mean about the plots being virtually identical in many ways.Mickey has built a robot who is a boxer. However, the robot isn't very good and everyone assumes the Kongo Killer (a gorilla) is going to win (where is PETA when you need them?!). However, Mickey has learned a secret--when his robot hears a horn, it goes crazy and becomes amazingly aggressive--to the point where it is almost impossible to stop.The main difference between this decent but not exactly inspired cartoon and the Stooge short is that when Curly hears the song "Three Blind Mice", he goes crazy and is unstoppable. Otherwise, it's the same. I wonder, though, why repeat the Disney plot when it isn't very good in the first place?! It's only a so-so cartoon--and certainly not among the best Mickey made in this era.

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.MICKEY'S MECHANICAL MAN, a boxing robot, engages in the Battle of the Century against The Kongo Killer, who's a real ape.This little black & white cartoon is a lot of fun, with The Mouse trying to control his unusual contraption. Good animation throughout. That's Walt supplying Mickey's squeaky voice.Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.