“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” a new series for preschool children that begins tonight on the Disney Channel, seeks to restore the primacy of the network’s most famous character. In a sense, Mickey has been demoted: the cartoon creature, who in his heyday chatted with Leopold Stokowski in “Fantasia” and was a hero of World War II (the password for Allied troops on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse”), is now teaching toddlers to count and identify shapes in a Sesame Streetish half-hour program that the network describes as “learning-focused.”
For much of his television career, the mouse was more a master of ceremonies than a comic lead. Now he has been whittled down to a Mister Rogers role — kindly and didactic.
What a way to treat a senior rodent (Mickey’s 77).