Review: Mickey Mouse Funhouse “Mickey the Brave!”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mickey and friends are taken to medieval times to take care of a misbehaving dragon.

OUR TAKE

Well well well, looks like we have another Disney Junior show on our hands. Covering these shows for such a young audience has certainly been a novel exercise for me in terms of critical analysis. Compared to my usual fare of shows or movies, which are made for an older or at least adolescent audience, these sorts of shows feel like taking a microscope to a detailed piece of rice. There’s not a whole lot there to really pick apart, but it’s still a nourishing meal for who it’s intended, not to mention that there may be at least some important detail or component worth discussing that is the sort of thing that I would want to see in any show or movie that I’m reviewing. The Chicken Squad has surprised me a few times with how it tackles certain subject, so maybe I’ll see the same with this sneak peek at a new show, Mickey Mouse Funhouse. Not to be confused with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or House of Mouse, the graphic novel Maus which covers the accounts of a holocaust survivor anthropomorphized as cats and mice by his cartoonist son. Not that you really needed help telling those apart, probably.

This series follows Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and the rest as they follow the instructions of a house with a big talking face (I wonder if this is where Face from Nick Jr ended up) to go to different places and times and I guess learn lessons. In this case, going to fantasy times and learning whether a dragon is good or bad. It seems pretty cut and dry at first as the dragon is clearly making a mess of things, but as mickey and friends take a close look at the dragon’s actions, they really just notice that the dragon is acting like an impressionable baby, likely because it is one. It’s not bad, it’s just misunderstood, is the main takeaway. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover and all that. I think that’s a pretty good start to this series, especially for its audience of really little kids. Some big and seemingly scary things might just be doing what they think is best and you should get to know them and understand where they’re coming before you make judgements. I’m sure this series will do great at what it sets out to do when it premieres in August.