Alcohol, cigarettes, wolf-eating pigs...

[DAVID.A.GERSTEIN]

      "Private" or otherwise controversial stories?
      When I was at Disney Comics, Inc., in 1991, I noticed a very 
polished one-panel gag up on Bob Foster's wall.  It read "Dumbo Meets 
Bucky Bug" and showed Bucky getting smooshed by a huge elephant foot. 
I wish I had asked for a copy of it.
      Harry showed me a Br'er Rabbit story of the same breed as that 
wolf one.  Molly is muttering that Br'er Rabbit, being a rabbit, 
wants a certain something all the time, and he's always asking her 
for it, and it's gotten to the point of no return... but what he's 
really after are carrots, thousands of them.
      I also once heard an (unsubstantiated) rumor that Disney 
animators, after-hours, produced a brief film in which MM fights with 
Pegleg Pete but loses... he gets killed.  I have a hunch my friend 
was just putting me on, but you never know.
      One coverless Dutch comic I have (it's those Dutch again!) has 
a Playboy-style centerfold of Clarabelle Cow.  She isn't naked or 
anything, and is (as usual) skinny as a rail, but is holding two 
enormous watermelons to her chest to look like breasts.
      There's always the famous MM suicide sequence from 1930 ("Mr. 
Slicker and the Egg Robbers"), but that IS banned in the United 
States, and besides, it's a completely harmless sequence (if you take 
for granted that suicide was not common among young children in 
1930, so at that time Disney wasn't seen as poking fun at an 
unfortunate crisis).  Of course, the reason Disney doesn't want it 
reprinted now is more that it's Mickey than that it shows attempted 
suicide.  The sequence ends with MM renouncing suicide and referring 
to himself as having been a "nut" for considering it.

       David Gerstein
       <9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>