Disney's Bringing Mickey Back

Disney just announced a very fun-sounding new project that will resurrect the 2D Mickey Mouse you knew and loved as a kid as well as that unmistakably vintage Disney look in a new cartoon series.

Disney just announced a very fun-sounding new project that will resurrect the 2D Mickey Mouse you knew and loved as a kid as well as that unmistakably vintage Disney look in a new cartoon series. The new show will include 19 different episodes, each showing Mickey in some exotic location — Paris, New York, Beijing, the Alps, etc. — getting into trouble as Mickey does. It's all done in the original 1920s and 1930s style that helped make Walt Disney's cartoons famous, and none of your favorite characters will be left out. Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy and Pluto all make appearances.

In a way, Mickey Mouse never left the world of Disney. The iconic mouse was just recast into a weirdly 3D song machine for the Disney Channel's toddler crowd. While those songs rack up hundreds of millions of YouTube views, it's probably fair to say Disney's missing out on a the demographics that are not in preschool. So they're going all out with this resurrection, adding a web game into the mix and making all of the shorts available online. The first one, Croissant de Triomphe, is already up and offers a preview of the fun. (It's also in French, though you'll hardly notice that little detail.) The rest of the series premieres on the Disney Channel on June 28

This isn't just about bringing viewers back to Disney, though. It's about bringing some excitement back to Mickey and the gang. "Over time we thought that maybe Mickey lost some of those impish or innocent qualities, that vitality that people once saw in him," said Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger on Tuesday. "So we decided to bring him back."

This is the kind of vitality that Iger is talking about: