People are just learning why Disney characters always wear white gloves, and there’s an eerie explanation.
Disney’s Mickey Mouse is one of the most well known animated characters of all time, created in 1928 by Walt Disney.
He’s appeared in over 121 theatrical cartoons, but very few have ever stopped to think about why the animated mouse always wear white gloves.
And it’s not just him.
Disney characters from Donald Duck to Goofy all wear the same accessory.
But why?
The gloves tradition seems to have been started by Mickey Mouse in Disney’s The Opry House in 1929.
And it apparently comes from vaudeville shows, and more specifically from minstrel performances.
Nicholas Sammond’s book, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, says early animators were influenced by vaudeville and minstrel shows.
So much that they often watched or even performed in them, and they based some of their cartoon drawings on white actors in blackface.
Minstrels would wear white gloves so that their hands stood out on stage, at a time where cartoons were made in black and white.
However, minstrel shows were considered racist, given that they were built on mocking and demeaning stereotypes of black people.
But gloves had other benefits for the film industry too.
While animation today tends to be far more detailed, cartoons were once extremely simple.
Gloves helped to simplify anatomy given that they didn’t require as much precision to create as hands.
They also distracted from the bizarre nature of these animal characters having human-like hands instead of paws, which we’re not entirely sure mice posses anyway.
And so, while taking inspiration from a very regrettable form of entertainment, the white gloves have persisted beyond black and white film and TV, partly due to practicality and partly due to tradition.
But it seems that Mickey wasn’t Walt’s first choice of animated animal.
In fact, he was forced to create the mouse after losing the rights to an earlier character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Speaking about Mickey wearing gloves, he said: “We didn’t want him to have mouse hands, because he was supposed to be more human.
“So we gave him gloves.
“Five fingers looked like too much on such a little figure, so we took one away.
“That was just one less finger to animate.”
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