The Picnic

The Picnic (1930)

Summertime, and Mickey takes Minnie on a picnic. While Pluto is chasing a rabbit, and Mickey and Minnie are doing a courtship dance, every animal in the woods is busy making off with their picnic food. And then the rain comes.

Date of release
1930-10-15
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (32)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Animation
Director
Burt Gillett

Interesting facts

The Picnic is a 1930 American animated short film directed by Burt Gillett. It was released on October 9, 1930. It is the 23rd film of the Mickey Mouse series. It is notable for being the first appearance of Pluto, here named Rover, who was redesigned into his current in the 1931 cartoon The Moose Hunt.

Production

The dog, called "Rover" in this cartoon, is an important step towards the creation of Pluto as a major character in the series. Animator Norm Ferguson first drew a pair of bloodhounds in the August 1930 Mickey Mouse short The Chain Gang, and Rover is clearly a continuation of that idea, even featuring a recycled gag from that picture in which one of the dogs sniffs into the camera.

Gijs Grob says in Mickey's Movies: The Theatrical Films of Mickey Mouse:

Ferguson had animated the bloodhounds in The Chain Gang which formed the blueprint for Pluto, and he would remain the expert on the character for the rest of Pluto's career, animating important scenes for him, like the flypaper scene in Playful Pluto (1934) and the skating scene in On Ice.

The dog returned as Pluto six months later in The Moose Hunt, and became so popular that he got his own series in 1937, starting with Pluto's Quintuplets.

In January 1931, Floyd Gottfredson drew a week-long adaptation of The Picnic in the Mickey Mouse comic strip. In the strip, the dog's name was "Tiny", and didn't bear as much resemblance to the final Pluto design as "Rover" did. Pluto appeared in the strip six months later, on July 8.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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