Mickey Mouse's 'Naughty' Makeover Promises to be Disturbing
Disney's beloved panda-rodent mascot is getting a video game makeover, and it'll give you more nightmares than the time he emptied all those buckets for that jerkface sorcerer. Because this time the nightmares might be, um, sexy?
Warren Spector, creative director of the firm developing the frighteningly three-dimensional Epic Mickey game, explains that everyone's favorite balloon-head is getting the My Scene Barbie treatment:
"I wanted him to be able to be naughty - when you're playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish."
The sexual creepiness here is subtle, which almost makes it worse, because you start wondering if maybe it's all in your head, and you're just the kind of perv who reads a sentence about an "adventurous, enthusiastic and curious" child-like character and suddenly starts wondering, wait, what is the third G in GGG? And: Well, his feet are pretty big. And: In retrospect, he always did dress a bit like a Chippendale dancer.
But seriously, ever since "naughty" crossed paths with "nurse" and "maid" and every female on Hugh Hefner's dance card, it should really just be off-limits to people whose jobs involve children. Luckily, Spector assures us that "Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people," mostly because the imagining of him as a coyly naughty-but-nice seducer is psychically troubling enough for one generation.
But the clearest sign of Epic Mickey's rapidly approaching failure is was a bad idea is the fact that it was "dreamed up" by "a group of interns" in 2004. I will do my best to refrain from drawing a gross generalization of what this corpus of Disney video game interns may be like—and what sort of sexual energies they may or may not be subconsciously channeling into their summer projects—but if you have ever entered a room (preferably in a darkened basement) where four, five, perhaps six male video game aficionados were fragging their way through a digitized slumber party, you will know that there is a particular odor of gamey, over-testosteroned adolescent male je ne sais quoi that will attack your sinuses and gag you as though a sweaty gym sock has just been stuffed down your throat. And that will be the scent of Epic Mickey: Stale, festering horror.