A Google image search for Mickey Mouse brings up stills from “Steamboat Willie,” the statue at the heart of Disneyland, and a guy in a full-on Mickey costume at the park. A Google image search for Minnie Mouse brings up a lot of drawings that aren’t from cartoons, a few kids in costumes, and suggestions for baby girls’ birthday parties. Despite having appeared in Mickey’s first cartoons, Minnie was the sixth Disney animated character to have their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, after Tinkerbell. While the Walk of Fame is ridiculous and meaningless, that does mean that people put more thought into being sure that Snow White got one—though I’ll note that apparently Goofy still doesn’t, so there’s that.

Minnie Mouse, sometimes formally named Minerva, does not appear in all the early Mickey Mouse shorts, but she appears in a lot of them. Disney’s first successful song was “Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo,” about Mickey’s love for her. For decades, she’s been a part of Mickey’s life—she, too, is about to enter the public domain. Yet she’s curiously forgotten and mostly just treated as an extension of Mickey. She did get her own animated series once, and it’s basically Casual Sexism: You Know, For Kids. She basically just doesn’t have a personality in a lot of her appearances.

From what I can tell, Minnie pretty much exists because, you know, you’ve got to have a love interest for your main character. I’m not sure she’s ever gotten to headline a cartoon herself; looking at her list of appearances includes things like “in a Figaro short.” Now, perhaps this month will be the time for my examination on the weird career of Figaro, but the point is, she’s listed as appearing in multiple cartoons starring characters who don’t speak and has no lead cartoons of her own. She also has no lines in “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” wherein she is of course Mrs. Cratchit.

Her original appearances basically treated her as a flapper character, and it would be interesting to try to bring her back to those roots. However, for the most part, Disney doesn’t seem inclined toward that. Mostly, they lean in to the domestic aspects of the character from the forties and fifties. Oh, it’s true that, in the deeply weird “Mickey’s Surprise Party,” she’s established as being a bad cook. In fact, a lot of the shorts where she’s domestic entail her being bad at being domestic, because that sort of thing was Comedy Gold during the Truman administration.

There’s a lot of speculation about what is going to happen with Mickey next year, when “Steamboat Willie” enters the public domain. (Apparently the current plan is to lean hard on “only ‘Steamboat Willie’ authentic Mickey is public domain, which I guess is current law anyway?) But I’d really like to see some more development of Minnie from people interested in actually making her a character, not a cipher. Maybe, just maybe, we could have the first-ever cartoon listed as starring Minnie Mouse wherein she’s not running a boutique where she solves everything with bows?

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